Re: [Chicken-hackers] [Chicken-users] Need help to figure out where this strange performance impact is coming from

[Jörg F . Wittenberger]

Hi Dan & chicken-hackers,

thanks for your reply.  I'm really curious how to explain these findings.

Complying with your suggestion, I'm sending this time to chicken-hackers
this time too.  I've been hoping enough of them would read chicken-users
too.

For reference to those who missed the initial posting, the message (with
attachment) is here:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2016-01/msg00033.html

Am 13.01.2016 um 18:32 schrieb Dan Leslie:
> IIRC, there's been ongoing efforts to remove SRFI-1 from core; which may 
> explain your observations regarding Master.

I'm aware of that and checked the relevant git history before I posted.
 After all that's been my first guess too.  But my digging did not yield
any hints.  Looks like this is going on in it's own branch.

Another wild guess of mine was "maybe specializations?".  That's why the
(use srfi-1) is close to the end of the file.  (Even though I'm not
completely sure that's enough.)

> Perhaps you should consider asking Chicken Hackers?
> 
> -Dan
> 
>   Original Message  
> From: Jörg F. Wittenberger
> Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2016 3:38 AM
> To: chicken-users
> Subject: [Chicken-users] Need help to figure out where this strange 
> performance impact is coming from
> 
> Hi Chickeneers,
> 
> yesterday I found that simply having a (use mailbox) in some code had a
> huge impact (more than a factor of 3) at the performance of the
> resulting executable. Without using the mailbox stuff at all.
> 
> Meanwhile I figured out that this has nothing at all to do with the
> mailbox egg. But _all_ with the use of srfi-1.
> 
> But how is this possible?
> 
> Attached some test code. As I ran into it from mailbox I prepared a
> stripped down version of it to play with. Towards the end of the file
> there is a (use srfi-1) which makes all the difference.
> 
> So far I found (compiling the code with -O5 but similar things happen
> with less aggressive optimization):
> 
> a) Using chicken 4.9.1 there is absolutely no difference. Using srfi-1
> or not I get roughly 100 messages passed per ms on my machine. (But I
> have to include the forced gc; see comment in the code.)
> 
> b) A slightly different version which avoids allocations in the queue
> runs without the forced gc and yields about 160 ms^-1 on chicken 4.9.1
> Again no difference whether or not I (use srfi-1) anywhere.
> 
> Now the interesting bits:
> 
> c) On master (built almost two weeks ago) I get - when (use srfi-1) is
> included - about 180 ms^-1. Those ~5% faster sound about right to me.
> 
> d) Comment out the (use srfi-1) at line 163 and it goes down to about
> _50_ per millisecond!
> 
> e) The same happens for the alternative, allocation free version (not
> attached), which uses vectors instead of pairs.
> 
> 
> Speculating: The code I wrote has nothing to do with the difference.
> 
> But I'm confused. Neither scheduler.scm nor srfi-18 seem to have any
> dependency on srfi-1. Also srfi-1 seems not to overwrite any global
> bindings.
> 
> Should we simply always (use srfi-1) if we also (use srfi-18). Looks
> like a workaround, but not like the right thing to do.
> 
> How could I boil this down to the real reason?
> 
> Best
> 
> /Jörg
>