[SciPy-Dev] default scipy fft performance

[Paul Anton Letnes]

Dear Scipy devs,

1) thanks for doing a great job in general!
2) Why is there a huge performance difference between scipy.fft and scipy.fftpack.fft? It apperars that scipy.fft == numpy.fft:

In [4]: import numpy as np

In [5]: from scipy import fft

In [6]: from scipy import fftpack

In [7]: d = np.linspace(0, 1e3, 1e7)

In [8]: %timeit np.fft.fft(d)
1 loops, best of 3: 1.29 s per loop

In [9]: %timeit fft(d)
1 loops, best of 3: 1.3 s per loop

In [10]: %timeit fftpack.fft(d)
1 loops, best of 3: 651 ms per loop

3) On a related note - what's the best performing python fft library/wrapper out there? I take it from some google research I did that e.g. fftw cannot be used due to the GPL licence.

Cheers,
Paul