[IronPython] Slow Performance of CPython libs?

[Michael Foord]

Birsch wrote:
> Hi - We've been using IronPython successfully to allow extensibility 
> of our application.
>
> Overall we are happy with the performance, with the exception of 
> BeautifulSoup which seems to run very slowly: x5 or more time to 
> execute compared to CPython.
>
> Most of the time seems to be spent during __init__() of BS, where the 
> markup is parsed.
>
> We suspect this has to do with the fact that our CPython env is 
> executing .pyc files and can precompile its libs, while the IronPython 
> environment compiles each iteration. We couldn't find a way to 
> pre-compile the libs and then introduce them into the code, but in any 
> case this will result in a large management overhead since the amount 
> of CPython libs we expose to our users contains 100's of modules.
>
> Any ideas on how to optimize?

I think it is worth doing real profiling to find out where the time is 
being spent during parsing.

If it is spending most of the time in '__init__' then the time is 
probably not spent in importing - so compilation isn't relevant and it 
is a runtime performance issue. (Importing is much slower with 
IronPython and at Resolver Systems we do use precompiled binaries - but 
strangely enough it doesn't provide much of a performance gain.)

Michael
http://www.manning.com/foord

>
> Thanks,
> -Birsch
>
> Note: we're using FePy/IPCE libs with regular IP v1.1.1 runtime DLLs 
> (this was done to overcome library incompatibilities and network 
> errors). However, the relevant slow .py code (mainly SGMLParser and 
> BeautifulSoup) is the same.
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