[Python-Dev] Compiling Python on Linux with Intel's icc

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:39:19 +0000
Alex Leach <albl500 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Obviously, I was hoping to get a faster python, but the size of the final 
> binary is almost twice the size of the default Ubuntu version (5.2MB cf. 
> 2.7MB), which I thought might cause a startup overhead that leads to slower 
> execution times when running such a basic script.

Did you compare the actual code sizes? The `size` command can help you
with that.

> *** TEST SCRIPT ***
> $ cat ~/bin/timetest.py
> 
> RANGE = 10000
> 
> print "running {0}^2 = {1} for loop iterations".format( RANGE,RANGE**2 )
> 
> for i in xrange(RANGE):
>     for j in xrange(RANGE):
>         i * j

That's an extremely silly benchmark, unlikely to be representative of
any actual Python workload. I suggest you try a less-trivial benchmark
suite, such as: http://hg.python.org/benchmarks/

Regards

Antoine.