[Dev] Performance Update: Why is Chandler slow on Mac?

[Ted Leung]

Alec Flett wrote:
> Ted Leung wrote:
>> Is it worthwhile trying to compile some of the smaller benchmarks on 
>> Windows using gcc to get some idea of how bad off we are using 
>> GCC?    We could do release builds on the mac using either the IBM 
>> XLC compiler or on Mac OS intel using intel's compiler
>>
> I'm guessing that trying to get chandler/wx building on a different 
> compiler is going to be a nightmare - not because of compiler 
> incompatibilities, but because getting all the Makefiles to do what we 
> want is going to be extremely tedious.. and its not clear to me if 
> there is any benefit beyond confirming that in fact VC++ is a better 
> compiler than gcc.
>
> It seems like what we've determined is "the python benchmarks are 
> slower on mac than windows because of gcc" - and that this is probably 
> true for all python apps... but Chandler on Linux isn't that bad.  
> While I think this was a useful exercise so that we can have a 
> baseline to compare windows to mac, it doesn't really explain why the 
> mac is also much faster than Linux. It sounds like we need to start 
> focusing on chandler-specific stuff, specifically wx and berkeleydb.
>
I didn't mean compiling all of chandler using gcc, just the micro 
benchmarks so that we could see if the perf ratios change with the 
compiler on the same platform.

Also my experience is the reverse, namely Linux is much faster than the 
Mac.  Or is that what you meant?   I did some benchmarks on berkeleydb a 
while back, and perf on mac was definitely not the same as on the other 
platforms.

Ted