benchmark

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:49:45 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:

> Jack wrote:
>> I know one benchmark doesn't mean much but it's still disappointing to
>> see Python as one of the slowest languages in the test:
>> 
>> http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2008/07/performance-comparison-c-java-
python-ruby-jython-jruby-groovy/
> 
> Just ignore that. If the code had been designed for Python from the
> start, it would have performed a lot better.


I recommend folks copy and paste his code into an interactive session, 
and watch the thousands of <__main__.Person object at 0xb7f18e2c> that 
flash onto the screen. You want to know why it's so slow? That's part of 
the reason.

Doing so on my computer gives a final result of:

"Time per iteration = 502.890818119 microseconds"

When I make a single, two character modification to the program 
(inserting "t=" at the beginning of the line "chain.kill(3)"), I get this 
instead:

"Time per iteration = 391.469910145 microseconds"

In other words, about 20% of the time he measures is the time taken to 
print junk to the screen.


-- 
Steven