[Python-Dev] tick_counter?

[Hye-Shik Chang]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 11:09:41AM -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
> Anyone know what the purpose of PyThreadState.tick_counter might be?
> AFAICT, it's initialized to 0, incremented by the eval loop now & again, and
> otherwise never referenced.
> 

According to SF #617311 written by Armin:
> 
> tstate->tick_counter is incremented whenever the check_interval
> ticker reaches zero.
> 
> The purpose is to give a useful measure of the number of interpreted
> bytecode instructions in a given thread. This extremely lightweight
> statistic collector can be of interest to profilers (like psyco.jit()).
> 
> We can safely guess that a single integer increment every 100
> interpreted bytecode instructions will go entierely unnoticed in
> any performance measure. [This is true for pystone.py.]


Hye-Shik