matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

Hi all,
On 8/16/07, Eric Firing <ef...@ha...> wrote:
> So, 10% slower with backend_agg, 18% slower with backend_svg. It's not
> devastating, but it's not so great, either.
>
> > Those results look fine to me. I dont know what has changed since we last
> > discussed this, but when Eric brought up the speed issue I remember the
> > traited config was significantly slower at that time. Maybe this is very good
> > news!
> >
> Maybe there is some sensitivity to machine architecture; my tests were
> on a Lenovo T60 laptop, Core2 at 2 GHz.
>
> For Fernando's simple_plot, using /usr/bin/time, I get:
> 0.53user 0.11system 0:00.66elapsed without traits
> 0.66user 0.21system 0:00.89elapsed with traits
>
> (The figures are quite repeatable; numbers above are representative. CPU
> is 98% in both cases.)
>
> So the total time for this very simple plot (which makes it something of
> a worst case) is more than 30% longer with traits than without, implying
> that the startup time increase is even larger as a percentage. One
> might argue that the difference of 0.23 seconds doesn't matter, but I
> think it is still worth considering. Maybe it can be beaten down to a
> small fraction of that.
Here's some interesting info. I'm sitting here with Dave Peterson,
from Enthought, and we've done a bunch of profiling that pointed to
setuptools, not Traits, being the culprit for the time increase.
We've now just done an install of Traits *without* any setuptools
(right now that requires manual surgery, but later it can be done
automatically if needed). Here are the resulting times:
# Using traits
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
*** Using Traits!!!
1.844u 0.212s 0:02.13 96.2% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
*** Using Traits!!!
1.840u 0.216s 0:02.58 79.4% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
*** Using Traits!!!
1.836u 0.196s 0:02.12 95.2% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
# NOT Using traits
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
2.200u 0.280s 0:02.67 92.8% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
2.248u 0.220s 0:02.74 89.7% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
maqroll[mpl-traits-debug]> time ./simple_plot.py
2.216u 0.244s 0:02.72 90.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
As you'll notice, the traits times are *lower*. This is what my gut
told me, since I know how tight the traits code is. The point is that
traits can actually give you a performance *benefit*, not a cost. The
problem is with setuptools, which goes ballistic on the filesystem at
init time. The profiles I sent earlier have already all the
information on that, if you use kcachegrind to see it (that's how Dave
and I pinned it down).
This hopefully settles the argument on the performance side. We'll
leave the final decision up to you guys, obviously. For IPython, this
settles the matter and we're going with traits, with setuptools banned
til further notice from ipython.
Cheers,
f