[Grok-dev] Grok, python 2.6 and unladen-swallow

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Sebastian Ware <sebastian at urbantalk.se> wrote:
> Having looked at some of the performance data of unladen-swallow
>
>   http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/Release2009Q1
>
> It would seem to bring huge performance benefits to Grok apps,
> especially when using Zodb-style backends. When is it reasonable to
> expect Grok to support python 2.6?

I tested repoze.bfg, Zope2 and Plone against unladen swallow (at
various points during their Q2 and Q3 development). There was no
noticeable performance improvement in any of those. Even when running
with "-j always" which means everything is JIT-compiled, you only got
a massively increased memory consumption but no real speed-up.

I'm afraid unladen swallow won't be a magic bullet making things
faster. Not unless they actually implement some real performance
optimization strategies for their LLVM code generation.

I tried profile based optimizations as found in gcc 4.4 as well at
some point and couldn't find any real improvements either. It seems
there are no simple optimizations that apply to large Zope based
applications, but it is sheer complexity and amount of code that is
slowing it down in the end. If you want to go faster by a large
margin, you need to do less and not the same stuff slightly faster.

Hanno