computer science, math, programming and other stuff
a blog by Christopher Swenson

Python 2.6? Shows promise, but I can't switch yet

Python 2.6 was recently released, with 3.0 coming out soon. Python 2.6 is meant to be sort of a stepping stone between the trusty old 2.x series and the hot, scary 3.0 series. So, naturally, I downloaded 2.6 to play with.

One of the nicest features has to be true multiprocessing support, allowing you to have multiple processes going, all started from within the same program. The Python docs even give a short example "demonstrating this", but it's probably the worst example ever. For one thing, it crashes semi-regularly (Queue implementation problem?), and the time.sleep() in the inner loop makes no sense.

So, I had to write my own simple benchmarking program to see if there was much of a difference (adapted from their sample program):

from multiprocessing import Process

def factorial(N):
fact = 1
for i in range(1, N+1):
fact = fact * i
return fact

if name == 'main':
import sys
if len(sys.argv) > 1 and (sys.argv[1] == "1" or sys.argv[1] == "2"):
N = int(sys.argv[1])
else:
sys.exit(1)

numbers = range(15000, 15002)

if N == 1:
factorial(numbers[0])
factorial(numbers[1])
else:
processes = [Process(target=factorial, args=(i,)) for i in numbers]
for p in processes:
p.start()
for p in processes:
p.join()
I tested it on my Core Duo (2 × 32-bit cores) on my MacBook Pro, with a single process and two processes, with run times of approximately 0.98 and 0.58 seconds, respectively, for a speedup of about 1.7×! Not too shabby at all. (Single process performance was nearly identical to that under Python 2.5, sadly.)

Normally, I'd be installing this on all of my systems, but, alas: scipy does not currently run under 2.6 (it breaks when compiling it). So, for now, I cannot afford to switch to 2.6.

Fat chance that any of my standard packages will work with Python 3.0, too.