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Add small-copy optimization for io::Cursor
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During benchmarking, I found that one of my programs spent between 5 and
10 percent of the time doing memmoves. Ultimately I tracked these down
to single-byte slices being copied with a memcopy in io::Cursor::read().
Doing a manual copy if only one byte is requested can speed things up
significantly. For my program, this reduced the running time by 20%.

Why special-case only a single byte, and not a "small" slice in general?
I tried doing this for slices of at most 64 bytes and of at most 8
bytes. In both cases my test program was significantly slower.
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ruuda committed Nov 30, 2016
1 parent 8e373b4 commit cd7fade
Showing 1 changed file with 15 additions and 3 deletions.
18 changes: 15 additions & 3 deletions src/libstd/io/cursor.rs
Expand Up @@ -219,9 +219,21 @@ impl<T> io::Seek for Cursor<T> where T: AsRef<[u8]> {
#[stable(feature = "rust1", since = "1.0.0")]
impl<T> Read for Cursor<T> where T: AsRef<[u8]> {
fn read(&mut self, buf: &mut [u8]) -> io::Result<usize> {
let n = Read::read(&mut self.fill_buf()?, buf)?;
self.pos += n as u64;
Ok(n)
// First check if the amount of bytes we want to read is small: the read
// in the else branch will end up calling `<&[u8] as Read>::read()`,
// which will copy the buffer using a memcopy. If we only want to read a
// single byte, then the overhead of the function call is significant.
let num_read = {
let mut inner_buf = self.fill_buf()?;
if buf.len() == 1 && inner_buf.len() > 0 {
buf[0] = inner_buf[0];
1
} else {
Read::read(&mut inner_buf, buf)?
}
};
self.pos += num_read as u64;
Ok(num_read)
}
}

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