[Python-ideas] Python's Source of Randomness and the random.py module Redux

[Donald Stufft]

On September 10, 2015 at 10:21:11 AM, Donald Stufft (donald at stufft.io) wrote:
> > Assuming Theo's claim of the speed of the ChaCha based arc4random  
> function
> is accurate, which I haven't tested but I assume he's smart enough  
> to know
> what he's talking about WRT to speed of it.

I wanted to try and test this. These are not super scientific since I just ran
them on a single computer once (but 10 million iterations each) but I think it
can probably give us an indication of the differences?

I put the code up at https://github.com/dstufft/randtest but it's a pretty
simple module. I'm not sure if (double)arc4random() / UINT_MAX is a reasonable
way to get a double out of arc4random (which returns a uint) that is between
0.0 and 1.0, but I assume it's fine at least for this test.

Here's the results from running the test on my personal computer which is
running the OSX El Capitan public Beta:

    $ python test.py
    Number of Calls:  10000000
    +---------------+--------------------+
    | method        | usecs per call     |
    +---------------+--------------------+
    | deterministic | 0.0586802460020408 |
    | system        | 1.6681434757076203 |
    | userland      | 0.1534261149005033 |
    +---------------+--------------------+


I'll try it against OpenBSD later to see if their implementation of arc4random
is faster than OSX.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA