Not sure why I’m spending the time on this problem, but it looked interesting. For starters read a Hacker’s News article that mentioned Python vs. Ruby performance, which in turned liked to a polish blog post.

The core of the blog post was this:

20 threads * 100,000 iterations Ruby 1.9 = 1.54 s. Ruby Enterprise = 3.01 s. JRuby 1.1.2 = 5.82 s. Jython 2.2.1 = 11.86 s. Python 2.5.2 = 12.32 s. Ruby 1.8.7 = 22.68 s.

Which is totally amazing for a performance improvement stand point, but in digging further the original code is:

from time import time from random import Random from threading import Thread rand = Random() . randint # alias class Test (Thread): def __init__ (self): Thread . __init__(self) print "Starting %s " % self . getName() def run (self): a = [rand( 0 ,SIZE) for x in xrange (SIZE)] a . sort() print " %s finished" % self . getName() print "Start" start = time() THREADS, SIZE = 20 , 100000 threads = [] for i in xrange (THREADS): t = Test() threads . append(t) t . start() while True in [t . isAlive() for t in threads]: pass print "Time: %s s" % (time() - start)

The first observation is that (unlike the ruby version) the python version has the overhead of a busy wait on the threads, so with than tiny fix (reduced runtime by 1 second)

for t in threads : if t . isAlive() : t . join()

Time: 17.6256890297 s

Doing a quick decomposition of this, we really have a program that’s doing the following

from time import time from random import Random rand = Random() . randint # alias THREADS, SIZE = 20 , 100000 print "Start" start = time() for t in xrange (THREADS) : a = [rand( 0 ,SIZE) for x in xrange (SIZE)] a . sort() print "Time: %s s" % (time() - start)

Time: 14.3786399364 s

Not getting into numbers, but this executes in almost the same time as the threaded version… Hmm, so is the ruby version really all about “Threading Performance”? Can’t be, has to be either in the random or the loop… Lets look further.

from time import time from random import Random rand = Random() . randint # alias THREADS, SIZE = 20 , 100000 print "Start" start = time() for t in xrange (THREADS) : for x in xrange (SIZE) : rand( 0 ,SIZE) print "Time: %s s" % (time() - start)

Time: 10.9540541172 s

There we have it, the rand() is taking 70% of the total time, while it does appear that the array append overhead is still 30% (~4 seconds) it’s at least useful to notice that there’s nothing that possible to improve it beyond this point.

Conclusion: Ruby might be faster, but to mix up a bunch of performance stats with threading is going to be problematic.

Update: In digging deeper python’s random number generator is written in python, thus of course it’s slow… It’s competing against a C version.