[Python-Dev] Re: Are we collecting benchmark results across machines

[Guido van Rossum]

> I suspect there are other folks who have run the pie-con benchmarks on
> their machines.  Perhaps we should construct a chart.  Times below are in
> seconds.
> 
> ~60	Guido's ancient 650Mhz Pentium
> ~27	Guido's desktop at work
> ~15	IBM T40 laptop
> 
> 88.550	dual 450 MHz Pentium 2
> 22.340	Athlon XP2800 (1243.363 MHz clock)
> 
> The latter two times are for Python 2.3.3 built out of the box using the
> Makefile (make time) shipped with the parrotbenchmarks ftp file on an
> unloaded machine. The times reported are the user time from the time
> triplet.

Perhaps we can turn this into a benchmark comparison chart.  In
particular, in my experience pystone is a pretty good indicator of
system performance even if it's a lousy benchmark.  I'll report the
pystone numbers for those same three systems:

home desktop: 10438.4 pystones/second
work desktop: 17421.6 pystones/second
laptop:       30198.1 pystones/second

Multiplying the pystone numbers with the parrotbench times should give
a constant if the benchmarks are equivalent.  But this doesn't look
good: I get

home desktop: 626304
work desktop: 470383
laptop:       452972

The home desktop is a clear outlier; it's more than twice as slow on
the parrot benchmark, but only 2/3rds slower on pystone...

(This is begging for a spreadsheet. :-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)