[Guido, to Oren Tirosh]
... Also note that your patch slows down fast access (by 3%)! How can it? Adding more code to the interpreter's inner loop changes the cache behavior, etc. Tim Peters can tell you more about this.
Not unless someone pays me to <wink>. Here's a cute one: I changed the "break" at the end of LOAD_GLOBAL to "continue". It didn't change the speed of global-lookup tests at all, but did give a small boost to fastlocal lookups. On several occasions we've seen evidence that ceval is supremely sensitive to I-cache accidents, although Marc-Andre is a lot better at provoking them than I am <wink -- but IIRC he once got a 15% slowdown by adding an unreachable(!) printf to ceval>. give-me-two-weeks-of-uninterrupted-time-with-a-hw-simulator-and-you'll- get-a-real-answer-ly y'rs - tim