[Image-SIG] PIL speed in single/multi threaded apps

[Rob Managan]

>Hi everyone;
>
>I've been doing a lot of multi-threaded GUI apps that use PIL lately, and
>was looking for ways to improve performance, especially when rapidly
>updating images being displayed on the screen after color changes.
>
>I decided to try to enable true multi-threading in the PIL core library to
>see what effects it had on performance.  Basically, although Python has
>multi-threading, unless an extension library explicitly "allows" other
>threads to run while it's busy doing intensive tasks, only one thread runs
>at a time.  So, even on a multi-CPU computer (or a Pentium 4 with
>hyperthreading), you don't really get the benefit of true multi-threading.
>
>So, I modified the geometry.c source file to add "Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS"
>and "Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS" blocks around the intensive tasks within the
>resize mechanisms to see what would happen.  I then wrote a test script that
>used multiple threads to simultaneously resize images, and I counted how
>many times I could resize an image in 30 seconds.  (see the script at the
>end for details).
>
>Here are the results, they're very interesting!  These were done with the
>"standard" PIL 1.1.4 binary and my modified version, both on a dual-CPU
>Athlon MP-1200 computer with 512MB RAM.
>
>1 Thread:  original:  805 resizes (max 60% CPU usage)
>1 Thread:  modified:  920 resizes (max 75% CPU usage)
>
>2 Threads: original:  758 resizes (max 60% CPU usage)
>2 Threads: modified:  1185 resizes (max 100% CPU usage)
>
>3 Threads:  original: 755 resizes (max 60% CPU usage)
>3 Threads:  modified:  1205 resizes (max 100% CPU usage)
>
>4 Threads:  original:  755 resizes (max 60% CPU usage)
>4 Threads:  modified:  1194 resizes (max 100% CPU usage)
>

The results for the standard PIL are not universal.

On a Dual 450 Mhx G4 running OSX 10.2.6 I get

1 thread : 469
2 threads: 466
3 threads: 453

So I get a slight slow down with multiple threads.
-- 
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-**-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Rob Managan               email managan at llnl.gov
LLNL                      phone: 925-423-0903
P.O. Box 808, L-095       FAX:   925-422-3389
Livermore, CA  94551-0808