Hi
What I have in mind is making selected objects smaller, for example by using smaller pointers. But how to know the performance benefit this will give?
That will limit python to 2GiB or maybe 4GiB of memory - I routinely run beyond that size in production systems.
There is a memory model that GCC supports that is 32bit pointers and 64bit ints.
I do not recall the performance comparisons, buts it is not used very much.
I think it would be helpful to know how much SLOWER things are when we make Python objects say 8 or 16 bytes LARGER. This would give an estimate of the improvement from making all Python objects smaller.
I've not done much performance testing before. Anyone here interested in doing it, or helping me do it? (Warning - I've never built Python before.)
Performance tests is hard to get right. I do this as my day job for a big Cloud app written mostly in Python.
There is an excellent book on performance measurement by Brendan Greg "Systems Performance; Enterprise and the Cloud".
Barry