[Python-Dev] Optimizing list.sort() by checking type in advance

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Mon Oct 10 17:49:07 EDT 2016


On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 2:16 PM, Elliot Gorokhovsky
<elliot.gorokhovsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm... that is strange, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the way
> I'm timing, though I agree perf/timeit would be better. I ran the benchmark
> a couple of times and the numbers seem to exactly line up something like one
> in five times; perhaps not that crazy considering they're executing nearly
> the same code?

No, computer clocks are precise enough, and CPUs are wonky enough
(cache effects, etc.), that it should be effectively impossible to get
the same timing result twice in row, even for running exactly the same
code. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's weird. Making these kinds
of measurements is much more complicated than it looks and you really
need to use something like timeit or perf if you want trustworthy
results. Fortunately, they're easy to use :-)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org


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