Christian Simms's Software R&D
   


About
Christian Simms's Software R&D, Generative Programming and other R&D.

Subscribe
Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS.

Links
These are a few of my favorite links.

  • Oligopoly Watch
  • Google News
  • The Register
  • Slashdot
  • F***edCompany
  • Drudge Report
  • The Economist


    		•         
    Sat, 31 May 2003

    In my spare time, I've been developing a J2EE code generator using python.
    However, I noticed that as I added new features, the performance was degrading considerably, so I decided to do some benchmarks. This is what I found.

    Below, each column name is a link to the source code for the given language. Each program is written in the style for that language, so for instance the Python version uses the built-in dictionary for hash tables, whereas the Java version uses HashMap class. Notice how these tests don't do something simple like test using hashes of int's, because I haven't had to do that kind of thing since college.

    Test Python Java (classic) Java (hotspot) C# g++ g++ (-O3)
    Dynamic Object Allocation 141,000/sec 168,000/sec 1,400,000/sec 52,300,000/sec 1,060,000/sec 1,450,000/sec
    Dynamic Object Allocation plus hash table get/set 9,880/sec 4,670/sec 56,300/sec 53,800/sec 19,100/sec 30,200/sec

    So what can we learn from this?

    • Java with hotspot compares favorably to C#
    • Java with hotspot is something like 10x faster than without
    • Python's about 5x slower than Java/C#
    • And most surprising (to me): Java and C# were both about twice as fast as C++! I had read that could be true, but seeing is believing.
    I tried speeding up the Python code using the Psycho JIT compiler, but without much luck. Actually, it was slightly slower (maybe 10% slower), and I think I know why. The Python versions of these tests primarily test the memory allocator and built-in dictionary type, neither of which can be JIT'ed because they're already native in the Python language, so I just saw the overhead of the JIT).

    [] permanent link