PPC OSX vs. x86 Linux

[Sells, Fred]

I'm no expert on internals, but I seem to recall that in the past, the
string module could be implemented in either C or Python and I think there
is a strop module that is related to all this.  Could it be that on the Mac,
your string processing is using interpreted Python byte code while linux
uses c?

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Ginsberg [mailto:listspam at flowtheory.net]
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2005 1:03 PM
To: python-list at mail.python.org
Subject: PPC OSX vs. x86 Linux


Hello --

I writing some python code to do some analysis of my mail logs. I took 
a 10,000 line snippet from them (the files are about 5-6 million 
usually) to test my code with. I'm developing it on a Powerbook G4 
1.2GHz with 1.25GB of RAM and the Apple distributed Python* and I 
tested my code on the 10,000 line snippet. It took 2 minutes and 10 
seconds to process that snippet. Way too slow -- I'd be looking at 
about 20 hours to process a single daily log file.

Just for fun, I copied the same code and the same log snippet to a 
dual-proc P3 500MHz machine running Fedora Core 2* with 1GB of RAM and 
tested it there. This machine provides web services and domain control 
for my network, so it's moderately utilized. The same code took six 
seconds to execute.

Granted I've got the GUI and all of that bogging down my Mac. However, 
I had nothing else fighting for CPU cycles and 700MB of RAM free when 
my testing was done. Even still, what would account for such a wide, 
wide, wide variation in the time required to process the data file? The 
code is 90% regular expressions and string finds.

Theories? Thanks!

-jag


* versions are:
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
and
Python 2.3.3 (#1, May  7 2004, 10:31:40)
[GCC 3.3.3 20040412 (Red Hat Linux 3.3.3-7)] on linux2


Joshua Ginsberg -- joshg at brainstorminternet.net
Brainstorm Internet Network Operations
970-247-1442 x131
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