RE Module Performance

[Joshua Landau]

On 28 July 2013 19:29, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Joshua Landau <joshua at landau.ws> wrote:
> > On 28 July 2013 09:45, Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Op 27-07-13 20:21, wxjmfauth at gmail.com schreef:
> >>>
> >>> utf-8 or any (utf) never need and never spend their time
> >>> in reencoding.
> >>
> >>
> >> So? That python sometimes needs to do some kind of background
> >> processing is not a problem, whether it is garbage collection,
> >> allocating more memory, shufling around data blocks or reencoding a
> >> string, that doesn't matter. If you've got a real world example where
> >> one of those things noticeably slows your program down or makes the
> >> program behave faulty then you have something that is worthy of
> >> attention.
> >
> >
> > Somewhat off topic, but befitting of the triviality of this thread, do I
> > understand correctly that you are saying garbage collection never causes
> any
> > noticeable slowdown in real-world circumstances? That's not remotely
> true.
>
> If it's done properly, garbage collection shouldn't hurt the *overall*
> performance of the app; most of the issues with GC timing are when one
> operation gets unexpectedly delayed for a GC run (making performance
> measurement hard, and such). It should certainly never cause your
> program to behave faultily, though I have seen cases where the GC run
> appears to cause the program to crash - something like this:
>
> some_string = buggy_call()
> ...
> gc()
> ...
> print(some_string)
>
> The buggy call mucked up the reference count, so the gc run actually
> wiped the string from memory - resulting in a segfault on next usage.
> But the GC wasn't at fault, the original call was. (Which, btw, was
> quite a debugging search, especially since the function in question
> wasn't my code.)
>

GC does have sometimes severe impact in memory-constrained environments,
though. See http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/,
about half-way down, specifically
http://sealedabstract.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screen-Shot-2013-05-14-at-10.15.29-PM.png
.

The best verification of these graphs I could find was
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/garbage-collection/, although
it's not immediately clear in Chrome's and Opera's case mainly due to none
of the benchmarks pushing memory usage significantly.

I also don't quite agree with the first post (sealedabstract) because I get
by *fine* on 2GB memory, so I don't see why you can't on a phone. Maybe IOS
is just really heavy. Nonetheless, the benchmarks aren't lying.
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