[Python-3000] Performance Notes

[Thomas Hunger]

> I've been doing some profiling of 3.0 vs. 2.6 release builds on
> Windows XP for the purpose of hopefully closing the performance
> gap. This data is very preliminary, but I thought I'd throw it out
> here in case someone else also wanted to look into this.  Also,
> possibly useful for comparing against profiling data on other
> platforms.  The table below just lists functions and speed
> differentials in 3.0 vs. 2.6, ordered by the functions in which we
> spend the most total time.

Hello, 

I don't know much about python internals, so the following might be 
bogus:

I replaced unicode_hash and string_hash with the hash function from 
here: http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/hash.html.

Then I ran the following micro-benchmark :

    $ time ./python bench.py

where bech.py is:

    f = dict((line, nr) for nr, line
             in enumerate(open('/usr/share/dict/words',
                               encoding='latin1').readlines()))

Python3k original hash: real    0m2.210s
              new hash: real    0m1.842s

So maybe this is an interesting hash function?

Tom