[Python-Dev] 2.5a1 Performance

[Jeff Epler]

I compiled 2.4 and 2.5 from svn.  The machine is Fedora Core 4, AMD64.

I built both with
    ./configure && make
(which gives a "64-bit" binary) and then ran pystone with 200000
iterations 10 times:
    for i in `seq 1 10`; do ./python Lib/test/pystone.py 200000 ; done

The machine was "near idle" at the time.

The best result for 2.4 (svn revision 43663) was 4.49 seconds (44343.4
pystones/second), which occurred on 4 of the runs.

The best result for 2.5 (svn revision 43675) was 4.27 seconds (46620
pystones/second), which occurred on only one run.  4.29 seconds, the
next best time, occurred on 3 runs.

I'm not trivially able to try a 32-bit build, but for my system it
appears that 2.5 is moderately faster than 2.4 when built with all the
defaults.

Jeff