[Python-Dev] Possible performance regression

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Feb 25, 2019, at 8:23 PM, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So it looks like commit ef4ac967 is not responsible for a performance
> regression.

I did narrow it down to that commit and I can consistently reproduce the timing differences.

That said, I'm only observing the effect when building with the Mac default Clang (Apple LLVM version 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5).   When building GCC 8.3.0, there is no change in performance.

I conclude this is only an issue for Mac builds.

> I ran the "performance" suite (https://github.com/python/performance),
> which has 57 different benchmarks. 

Many of those benchmarks don't measure eval-loop performance.  Instead, they exercise json, pickle, sqlite etc.  So, I would expect no change in many of those because they weren't touched.

Victor said he generally doesn't care about 5% regressions.  That makes sense for odd corners of Python.  The reason I was concerned about this one is that it hits the eval-loop and seems to effect every single op code.  The regression applies somewhat broadly (increasing the cost of reading and writing local variables by about 20%).  The effect is somewhat broad based.

That said, it seems to be compiler specific and only affects the Mac builds, so maybe we can decide that we don't care.


Raymond