in reply to Time Penalty vs. Global Symbols

Here's a simple benchmark showing the differences on a sample program I wrote. I don't know how accurately it answers this question, but it gives an idea of the differences.

#!perl use strict; use warnings; use Benchmark qw(:all); my $foo; timethese('50000000', { 'test_1' => sub { $foo = 1; }, 'test_2' => sub { my $bar = 1; }, }); 1; __END__ fred@fishman ~ $ perl scope.pl Benchmark: timing 10000000 iterations of test_1, test_2... test_1: 0 wallclock secs ( 1.03 usr + 0.01 sys = 1.04 CPU) @ 96 +15384.62/s (n=10000000) test_2: 2 wallclock secs ( 1.38 usr + 0.01 sys = 1.39 CPU) @ 71 +94244.60/s (n=10000000) fred@fishman ~ $ perl scope.pl Benchmark: timing 50000000 iterations of test_1, test_2... test_1: 6 wallclock secs ( 5.19 usr + 0.01 sys = 5.20 CPU) @ 96 +15384.62/s (n=50000000) test_2: 6 wallclock secs ( 6.51 usr + 0.00 sys = 6.51 CPU) @ 76 +80491.55/s (n=50000000)

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Re^2: Time Penalty vs. Global Symbols
by xdg (Monsignor) on Jan 13, 2005 at 21:33 UTC

    The benchmark above shows the cost of the "my" in the loop. This compares both lexical approaches with the package variable (aka "global") approach:

    my $foo; our $foo2; cmpthese(shift, { 'test_1' => sub { $foo = 1; }, 'test_2' => sub { my $bar = 1; }, 'test_3' => sub { $foo2 = 1; }, }); __END__ Rate test_2 test_1 test_3 test_2 3731343/s -- -30% -37% test_1 5347594/s 43% -- -10% test_3 5952381/s 60% 11% --

    But the apparent gaps diminish rapidly as you start doing even a little work, particularly if system interaction is involved:

    my $foo; our $foo2; cmpthese(shift, { 'test_1' => sub { $foo = time; $foo += 1 if __PACKAGE__ eq 'ma +in' }, 'test_2' => sub { my $bar = time; $bar += 1 if __PACKAGE__ eq +'main' }, 'test_3' => sub { $foo2 = time; $foo2 += 1 if __PACKAGE__ eq ' +main' }, }); __END__ Rate test_2 test_3 test_1 test_2 442478/s -- -4% -10% test_3 462963/s 5% -- -6% test_1 492611/s 11% 6% --

    Interesting that the order reverses, thought it might just margin of error

    -xdg

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