Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances

»»» This post is about the immature Perl 6, not the rock solid Perl 5 «««

Jonathan Worthington has just delivered a presentation at YAPC::EU discussing Rakudo performance work over the last 12 months. There's a video of the talk and slides.

The presentation includes a look at benchmarks comparing a recent Rakudo (on MoarVM) with the 2013.08 release of Rakudo (on Parrot) and Perl 5 v20. I'm curious what folk make of the numbers on page 76.

He also revealed a new profiling tool. Update: Here it is profiling some P6 code.

If any readers have tried Perl 6 but found it too slow, now might be a good time to try again; you should find that it's a lot faster than it was, and if it isn't fast enough for your use case it's now a lot easier to both see what's making it slow and to make it faster.

»ö« ^{. o O ( "the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult?" )}

Comment on Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances

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Re: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by gunzip (Monk) on Sep 05, 2014 at 02:23 UTC
On OSX 10.8 with Perl 5.16 and Perl6/MoarVM 2014.08 I ran these one-liners against a 17Mb Apache log file: `perl -wnl -E 'say $1 if /\b(\w{5})\b/' logs.txt` `perl6 -n -e 'say $0 if ~~ m/(<<\w**5>>)/' logs.txt` Perl 5 took 1.2 seconds and Perl6 2mins. 49 seconds so I'm not confident that Perl6 will ever be anywhere near Perl 5 for common use cases such as this.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by salva (Canon) on Sep 05, 2014 at 10:02 UTC
I'm not confident that Perl6 will ever be anywhere near Perl 5 for common use cases such as this. In Perl 5 regular expressions are handled by an ad-hoc, highly-optimized matcher (it's like a different interpreter). In Perl 6 (well, Rakudo, actually) I believe they are just compiled into regular "bytecode" which is then executed by the virtual machine as any other perl 6 code. Perl 6 approach is much more generic and powerful but it would take a while until all the involved layers get as fast as the ad-hoc perl5 matcher. In the worst case, Rakudo could just fall-back to the perl 5 approach for simple regular expressions.	[reply]
Re^2: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by FROGGS (Novice) on Sep 05, 2014 at 10:43 UTC
.lines() and -n are really really slow in rakudo, the code behind that is not really clever, compared to the code in Perl 5 (there is a talk by leont about what P5 does there). This should be better: `perl6 -e 'grammar G { token TOP { <line>* }; token line { \N\n } }; class A { method line($m) { say ~$0 if $m ~~ m/(<<\w*5>>)/ } }; G.parse(slurp(), :actions(A))'` If tested that on a file from my box, result: Perl 5: 0.2s Perl 6: 6.2s That would mean that it might take about 45s on your box... can you verify that? Note 1) String handling is the slowest part in rakudo atm. Note 2) You should not compare printing the .gist of a match to a string from another language. Because Date::Dumper-ing an object in P5 is not really fast either. And that is what .gist somewhat is. (.gist is the human friendly nice formatted version of Data::Dumper aka method .perl) Note 3) I promised to look into the cheats P5 does when walking over lines, and I'll do that this weekend.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by gunzip (Monk) on Sep 05, 2014 at 17:04 UTC
Results for a similar 19MB log file on my 2013 Macbook Pro: Perl 5: 0.68 secs Perl 6/Grammar: 49.8 secs … so 73 times slower.	[reply]
Re^4: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by raiph (Deacon) on Sep 15, 2014 at 15:55 UTC
Re^2: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by Mouq (Initiate) on Sep 05, 2014 at 06:39 UTC
FWIW, `perl6 -ne 'say ~$0 if m/(<<\w**5>>)/' …` is much faster. Something likely needs to be optimized in `Match.gist`. It's still much slower than Perl 5	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by Mouq (Initiate) on Sep 05, 2014 at 06:49 UTC
Additionally, appending `for lines` gives a significant gain over using `-n`, so that needs works as well. EDIT: I agree that '-n' should be what is used here, I was moreso posting in the interest of figuring out why that's so slow. I just made a PR which seems to bring the time for '-n' to be more like that of 'for lines'	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by gunzip (Monk) on Sep 05, 2014 at 07:36 UTC
Re^5: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 05, 2014 at 09:40 UTC
Re^2: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by grondilu (Friar) on Sep 05, 2014 at 06:14 UTC
That's not great indeed. I don't really hope this will make much of a difference, but you did not have to capture the match with parenthesis. You could have just used $/: `perl6 -n -e 'say $/ if m/<<\w**5>>/' logs.txt` On the other hand, even if this does make a difference, the optimizer should have converted it automatically.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by gunzip (Monk) on Sep 05, 2014 at 06:37 UTC
Perl 6 now 2 mins. 20 seconds. For the record Ruby 2.1: `ruby -wnl -e 'puts $1 if /\b(\w{5})\b/' logs.txt` ... completed in 2 seconds.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by Laurent_R (Canon) on Aug 23, 2014 at 09:04 UTC
Thank you very much, raiph, for sharing this very interesting information. It looks like we're still not really quite there, but have made a pretty large part of the way toward it.	[reply]
Re^2: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances by raiph (Deacon) on Aug 24, 2014 at 01:09 UTC
Here's an example of the new profiler in action (I've added the same link to to the original post). :) »ö« ^{. o O ( "the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult?" )}	[reply]

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