[New-bugs-announce] [issue43895] Unnecessary Cache of Shared Object Handles

[Ian H]

New submission from Ian H <insertinterestingnamehere at gmail.com>:

While working on another project I noticed that there's a cache of shared object handles kept inside _PyImport_FindSharedFuncptr. See https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/b2b6cd00c6329426fc3b34700f2e22155b44168c/Python/dynload_shlib.c#L51-L55. It appears to be an optimization to work around poor caching of shared object handles in old libc implementations. After some testing, I have been unable to find any meaningful performance difference from this cache, so I propose we remove it to save the space.

My initial tests were on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). I saw no discernible difference in the time for running the Python test suite with a single thread. Running the test suite using a single thread shows a lot of variance, but after running with and without the cache 40 times the mean times with/without the cache was nearly the same. Interpreter startup time also appears to be unaffected. This was all with a debug build, so I'm in the process of collecting data with a release build to see if that changes anything.

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messages: 391453
nosy: Ian.H
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Unnecessary Cache of Shared Object Handles
versions: Python 3.10

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue43895>
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