[Python-Dev] eval() slowdown in 2.2 on MacOS X?

[Skip Montanaro]

    amk> test_longexp creates a big list expression and eval()'s it.  The
    amk> problem is that it takes an exceedingly long time to run, at least
    amk> more than half an hour (at which point she interrupted it).
    ...
    amk> changing REPS from 1000 to 50000.  1000 and 10000 ran fairly
    amk> quickly - under a minute.  However, 25000 took about 5 minutes and
    amk> 50000 took 23 minutes.
    ...
    amk> Any clues?

Try configuring using --with-pymalloc to see if Vladimir's Python-specific
object allocator helps.  Even with a gigabyte of RAM, perhaps the malloc
free list is getting badly fragmented, causing it to churn forever trying to
coalesce memory blocks.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip@pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)