slow on HPUX, SunOS, fast on MS Win2K and Linux?

[Harry George]

Is there some reason python code which builds objects should be
notably slow on HPUX or SunOS? Some known code optimization problem?

We are seeing:

> -----------
> import cPickle
> f = 
> open("/acct/mad5486/SpecEngineV0/bac5117-compiled.xml-pickled",'r')
> xml_dom_object = cPickle.load(f)
> ----------------------------END-------------------------------
> ----------
> 
> Times:
> 
>  5 seconds on Intel / Linux
>  5 seconds on Intel / Win2k
> 33 seconds on HP-UX 11.0  (uname -a: HP-UX dblv018 B.11.00 E 9000/800)
> 22 seconds on Sun OS (uname -a: SunOS wizard 5.8 
> Generic_112953-02 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterpris) 
> 17 seconds on HP-UX 10.2  (uname -a: HP-UX drtn029 B.10.20 E 9000/819)
> 

The Win2K and Linux boxes are (nearly) identical hardware.  The others
are serious machines with substantial RAM.  The guy running the tests
tried to isolate for these issues:

1. No one else on the machine; light load of background tasks.

2. Code and datafile cached in RAM (no delays due to LAN-based file
   servers).

3. Results similar for Py 1.5.2 and 2.2.1 on each machine.

4. According to "top" process was getting 99% of CPU, and it was CPU
   bound.

5. While this example is from the pickle, the same effects were seen
   for the original PyXML parse of the DOM.

-- 
harry.g.george at boeing.com
6-6M31 Knowledge Management
Phone: (425) 294-8757