Perl 6 is currently slow compared to Perl 5 reading ASCII text files line by line (although the time differences are not so large when UTF-8 files are read). Such line processing is a staple of data processing in use cases such as analyzing output of many kinds of programs. An example is the category of programs known as raytracing, one of which, used heavily by analysts and scientists, is BRL-CAD.
This test suite was developed to monitor the progress of Perl 6 versus Perl 5 in closing the gap of processing an ASCII or UTF-8 file of many lines. The test files are of varying numbers of lines, each line consisting of 100 bytes, including the ending newline.
The tests currently compare Perl 6 versus Perl 5 under the following conditions:
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reading UTF-8 files (Perl 6 native read, Perl 5 using the '<:encoding(UTF-8)' form of open)
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reading ASCII files (native read with both Perl versions)
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reading ASCII files (Perl 6 using the ':enc' form of open)
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reading ASCII files (Perl 6 using the ':enc' form of open)
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Edit file
run-rw-tests.p6to set the value of array@Sto the number and size of tests to run. Note that a bare number will be interpreted as Megabytes and a number with an 'M' or 'G' appended will be interpreted accordingly. The settings that generate most test logs shown on the github site are:@S = <1m 1g 5g 10g>; # 10K, 10M, 50M, 100M lines, respectively
$ntrials = 3;
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Edit file
run-rw-tests.p6to set the variable$ntrialsfor the number of trials desired for each size file -
Exexute file
run-rw-tests.p6. Two log files will be generated and each placed in the appropriatelogssubdirectories (which will be created if they don't exist).
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Date: 2017-05-17
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File type: ASCII
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Rakudo version: 2017.04.3-275-g84502dc
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Perl 5 version: 5.20.2
| Size | Number lines | Trials | Perl 5 T | Perl 6 T | P6T / P5T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Mb | 10,000 | 3 | 0.03 s | 0.86 s | 28.7 |
| 1 Gb | 10,000,000 | 3 | 2.73 s | 51.50 s | 18.9 |
| 5 Gb | 50,000,000 | 3 | 27.41 s | 410.00 s | 15.0 |
| 10 Gb | 100,000,000 | 3 | 66.39 s | 860.56 s | 13.0 |
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Date: 2017-06-29
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File type: ASCII
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Rakudo version: 2017.06-45-g86e7b2b
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Perl 5 version: 5.20.2
| Size | Number lines) | Trials | Perl 5 T | Perl 6 T | P6T / P5T | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Mb | 10,000 | 3 | 0.03 s | 0.60 s | 20.0 | 30.3% |
| 1 Gb | 10,000,000 | 3 | 2.67 s | 32.27 s | 12.1 | 36.0% |
| 5 Gb | 50,000,000 | 3 | 24.37 s | 276.41 s | 11.3 | 24.7% |
| 10 Gb | 100,000,000 | 3 | 55.40 s | 582.37 s | 10.5 | 19.2% |
Notes:
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See the complete results in log files in the logs subdirectories.
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T - Time: user time from the GNU
timeprogram. -
Improvement - (prev P6T/P5T less curr P6T/P5T)/(prev P6T/P5T)
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When the number of trials is > 1, the user time data are averages over that number.
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This suite is developed on a Debian system with no consideration to it running successfully on any other OS. Pull requests are welcome.