perlperf(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide perlperf(1)
NAME
perlperf - Perl Performance and Optimization Techniques
DESCRIPTION
This is an introduction to the use of performance and optimization
techniques which can be used with particular reference to perl
programs. While many perl developers have come from other languages,
and can use their prior knowledge where appropriate, there are many
other people who might benefit from a few perl specific pointers. If
you want the condensed version, perhaps the best advice comes from the
renowned Japanese Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, who said:
"Do Not Engage in Useless Activity"
in 1645.
OVERVIEW
Perhaps the most common mistake programmers make is to attempt to
optimize their code before a program actually does anything useful -
this is a bad idea. There's no point in having an extremely fast
program that doesn't work. The first job is to get a program to
correctly do something useful, (not to mention ensuring the test suite
is fully functional), and only then to consider optimizing it. Having
decided to optimize existing working code, there are several simple but
essential steps to consider which are intrinsic to any optimization
process.
ONE STEP SIDEWAYS
Firstly, you need to establish a baseline time for the existing code,
which timing needs to be reliable and repeatable. You'll probably want
to use the "Benchmark" or "Devel::NYTProf" modules, or something
similar, for this step, or perhaps the Unix system "time" utility,
whichever is appropriate. See the base of this document for a longer
list of benchmarking and profiling modules, and recommended further
reading.
ONE STEP FORWARD
Next, having examined the program for hot spots, (places where the code
seems to run slowly), change the code with the intention of making it
run faster. Using version control software, like "subversion", will
ensure no changes are irreversible. It's too easy to fiddle here and
fiddle there - don't change too much at any one time or you might not
discover which piece of code really was the slow bit.
ANOTHER STEP SIDEWAYS
It's not enough to say: "that will make it run faster", you have to
check it. Rerun the code under control of the benchmarking or
profiling modules, from the first step above, and check that the new
code executed the same task in less time. Save your work and repeat...
GENERAL GUIDELINES
The critical thing when considering performance is to remember there is
no such thing as a "Golden Bullet", which is why there are no rules,
only guidelines.
It is clear that inline code is going to be faster than subroutine or
method calls, because there is less overhead, but this approach has the
disadvantage of being less maintainable and comes at the cost of
greater memory usage - there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you
are searching for an element in a list, it can be more efficient to
store the data in a hash structure, and then simply look to see whether
the key is defined, rather than to loop through the entire array using
grep() for instance. substr() may be (a lot) faster than grep() but
not as flexible, so you have another trade-off to access. Your code
may contain a line which takes 0.01 of a second to execute which if you
call it 1,000 times, quite likely in a program parsing even medium
sized files for instance, you already have a 10 second delay, in just
one single code location, and if you call that line 100,000 times, your
entire program will slow down to an unbearable crawl.
Using a subroutine as part of your sort is a powerful way to get
exactly what you want, but will usually be slower than the built-in
alphabetic "cmp" and numeric "<=>" sort operators. It is possible to
make multiple passes over your data, building indices to make the
upcoming sort more efficient, and to use what is known as the "OM"
(Orcish Maneuver) to cache the sort keys in advance. The cache lookup,
while a good idea, can itself be a source of slowdown by enforcing a
double pass over the data - once to setup the cache, and once to sort
the data. Using pack() to extract the required sort key into a
consistent string can be an efficient way to build a single string to
compare, instead of using multiple sort keys, which makes it possible
to use the standard, written in "c" and fast, perl sort() function on
the output, and is the basis of the "GRT" (Guttman Rossler Transform).
Some string combinations can slow the "GRT" down, by just being too
plain complex for its own good.
For applications using database backends, the standard "DBIx" namespace
has tries to help with keeping things nippy, not least because it tries
to not query the database until the latest possible moment, but always
read the docs which come with your choice of libraries. Among the many
issues facing developers dealing with databases should remain aware of
is to always use "SQL" placeholders and to consider pre-fetching data
sets when this might prove advantageous. Splitting up a large file by
assigning multiple processes to parsing a single file, using say "POE",
"threads" or "fork" can also be a useful way of optimizing your usage
of the available "CPU" resources, though this technique is fraught with
concurrency issues and demands high attention to detail.
Every case has a specific application and one or more exceptions, and
there is no replacement for running a few tests and finding out which
method works best for your particular environment, this is why writing
optimal code is not an exact science, and why we love using Perl so
much - TMTOWTDI.
BENCHMARKS
Here are a few examples to demonstrate usage of Perl's benchmarking
tools.
Assigning and Dereferencing Variables.
I'm sure most of us have seen code which looks like, (or worse than),
this:
if ( $obj->{_ref}->{_myscore} >= $obj->{_ref}->{_yourscore} ) {
...
This sort of code can be a real eyesore to read, as well as being very
sensitive to typos, and it's much clearer to dereference the variable
explicitly. We're side-stepping the issue of working with object-
oriented programming techniques to encapsulate variable access via
methods, only accessible through an object. Here we're just discussing
the technical implementation of choice, and whether this has an effect
on performance. We can see whether this dereferencing operation, has
any overhead by putting comparative code in a file and running a
"Benchmark" test.
# dereference
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.36;
use Benchmark;
my $ref = {
'ref' => {
_myscore => '100 + 1',
_yourscore => '102 - 1',
},
};
timethese(1000000, {
'direct' => sub {
my $x = $ref->{ref}->{_myscore} . $ref->{ref}->{_yourscore} ;
},
'dereference' => sub {
my $ref = $ref->{ref};
my $myscore = $ref->{_myscore};
my $yourscore = $ref->{_yourscore};
my $x = $myscore . $yourscore;
},
});
It's essential to run any timing measurements a sufficient number of
times so the numbers settle on a numerical average, otherwise each run
will naturally fluctuate due to variations in the environment, to
reduce the effect of contention for "CPU" resources and network
bandwidth for instance. Running the above code for one million
iterations, we can take a look at the report output by the "Benchmark"
module, to see which approach is the most effective.
$> perl dereference
Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of dereference, direct...
dereference: 2 wallclock secs ( 1.59 usr + 0.00 sys = 1.59 CPU) @ 628930.82/s (n=1000000)
direct: 1 wallclock secs ( 1.20 usr + 0.00 sys = 1.20 CPU) @ 833333.33/s (n=1000000)
The difference is clear to see and the dereferencing approach is
slower. While it managed to execute an average of 628,930 times a
second during our test, the direct approach managed to run an
additional 204,403 times, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because there
are many examples of code written using the multiple layer direct
variable access, and it's usually horrible. It is, however, minusculy
faster. The question remains whether the minute gain is actually worth
the eyestrain, or the loss of maintainability.
Search and replace or tr
If we have a string which needs to be modified, while a regex will
almost always be much more flexible, "tr", an oft underused tool, can
still be a useful. One scenario might be replace all vowels with
another character. The regex solution might look like this:
$str =~ s/[aeiou]/x/g
The "tr" alternative might look like this:
$str =~ tr/aeiou/xxxxx/
We can put that into a test file which we can run to check which
approach is the fastest, using a global $STR variable to assign to the
"my $str" variable so as to avoid perl trying to optimize any of the
work away by noticing it's assigned only the once.
# regex-transliterate
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.36;
use Benchmark;
my $STR = "$$-this and that";
timethese( 1000000, {
'sr' => sub { my $str = $STR; $str =~ s/[aeiou]/x/g; return $str; },
'tr' => sub { my $str = $STR; $str =~ tr/aeiou/xxxxx/; return $str; },
});
Running the code gives us our results:
$> perl regex-transliterate
Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of sr, tr...
sr: 2 wallclock secs ( 1.19 usr + 0.00 sys = 1.19 CPU) @ 840336.13/s (n=1000000)
tr: 0 wallclock secs ( 0.49 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.49 CPU) @ 2040816.33/s (n=1000000)
The "tr" version is a clear winner. One solution is flexible, the
other is fast - and it's appropriately the programmer's choice which to
use.
Check the "Benchmark" docs for further useful techniques.
PROFILING TOOLS
A slightly larger piece of code will provide something on which a
profiler can produce more extensive reporting statistics. This example
uses the simplistic "wordmatch" program which parses a given input file
and spews out a short report on the contents.
# wordmatch
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.36;
=head1 NAME
filewords - word analysis of input file
=head1 SYNOPSIS
filewords -f inputfilename [-d]
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This program parses the given filename, specified with C<-f>, and
displays a simple analysis of the words found therein. Use the C<-d>
switch to enable debugging messages.
=cut
use FileHandle;
use Getopt::Long;
my $debug = 0;
my $file = '';
my $result = GetOptions (
'debug' => \$debug,
'file=s' => \$file,
);
die("invalid args") unless $result;
unless ( -f $file ) {
die("Usage: $0 -f filename [-d]");
}
my $FH = FileHandle->new("< $file")
or die("unable to open file($file): $!");
my $i_LINES = 0;
my $i_WORDS = 0;
my %count = ();
my @lines = <$FH>;
foreach my $line ( @lines ) {
$i_LINES++;
$line =~ s/\n//;
my @words = split(/ +/, $line);
my $i_words = scalar(@words);
$i_WORDS = $i_WORDS + $i_words;
debug("line: $i_LINES supplying $i_words words: @words");
my $i_word = 0;
foreach my $word ( @words ) {
$i_word++;
$count{$i_LINES}{spec} += matches($i_word, $word,
'[^a-zA-Z0-9]');
$count{$i_LINES}{only} += matches($i_word, $word,
'^[^a-zA-Z0-9]+$');
$count{$i_LINES}{cons} += matches($i_word, $word,
'^[(?i:bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz)]+$');
$count{$i_LINES}{vows} += matches($i_word, $word,
'^[(?i:aeiou)]+$');
$count{$i_LINES}{caps} += matches($i_word, $word,
'^[(A-Z)]+$');
}
}
print report( %count );
sub matches {
my $i_wd = shift;
my $word = shift;
my $regex = shift;
my $has = 0;
if ( $word =~ /($regex)/ ) {
$has++ if $1;
}
debug( "word: $i_wd "
. ($has ? 'matches' : 'does not match')
. " chars: /$regex/");
return $has;
}
sub report {
my %report = @_;
my %rep;
foreach my $line ( keys %report ) {
foreach my $key ( keys $report{$line}->%* ) {
$rep{$key} += $report{$line}{$key};
}
}
my $report = qq|
$0 report for $file:
lines in file: $i_LINES
words in file: $i_WORDS
words with special (non-word) characters: $i_spec
words with only special (non-word) characters: $i_only
words with only consonants: $i_cons
words with only capital letters: $i_caps
words with only vowels: $i_vows
|;
return $report;
}
sub debug {
my $message = shift;
if ( $debug ) {
print STDERR "DBG: $message\n";
}
}
exit 0;
Devel::DProf
This venerable module has been the de-facto standard for Perl code
profiling for more than a decade, but has been replaced by a number of
other modules which have brought us back to the 21st century. Although
you're recommended to evaluate your tool from the several mentioned
here and from the CPAN list at the base of this document, (and
currently Devel::NYTProf seems to be the weapon of choice - see below),
we'll take a quick look at the output from Devel::DProf first, to set a
baseline for Perl profiling tools. Run the above program under the
control of "Devel::DProf" by using the "-d" switch on the command-line.
$> perl -d:DProf wordmatch -f perl5db.pl
<...multiple lines snipped...>
wordmatch report for perl5db.pl:
lines in file: 9428
words in file: 50243
words with special (non-word) characters: 20480
words with only special (non-word) characters: 7790
words with only consonants: 4801
words with only capital letters: 1316
words with only vowels: 1701
"Devel::DProf" produces a special file, called tmon.out by default, and
this file is read by the "dprofpp" program, which is already installed
as part of the "Devel::DProf" distribution. If you call "dprofpp" with
no options, it will read the tmon.out file in the current directory and
produce a human readable statistics report of the run of your program.
Note that this may take a little time.
$> dprofpp
Total Elapsed Time = 2.951677 Seconds
User+System Time = 2.871677 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c Name
102. 2.945 3.003 251215 0.0000 0.0000 main::matches
2.40 0.069 0.069 260643 0.0000 0.0000 main::debug
1.74 0.050 0.050 1 0.0500 0.0500 main::report
1.04 0.030 0.049 4 0.0075 0.0123 main::BEGIN
0.35 0.010 0.010 3 0.0033 0.0033 Exporter::as_heavy
0.35 0.010 0.010 7 0.0014 0.0014 IO::File::BEGIN
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Getopt::Long::FindOption
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Symbol::BEGIN
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Fcntl::BEGIN
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Fcntl::bootstrap
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - warnings::BEGIN
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - IO::bootstrap
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Getopt::Long::ConfigDefaults
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Getopt::Long::Configure
0.00 - -0.000 1 - - Symbol::gensym
"dprofpp" will produce some quite detailed reporting on the activity of
the "wordmatch" program. The wallclock, user and system, times are at
the top of the analysis, and after this are the main columns defining
which define the report. Check the "dprofpp" docs for details of the
many options it supports.
See also "Apache::DProf" which hooks "Devel::DProf" into "mod_perl".
Devel::Profiler
Let's take a look at the same program using a different profiler:
"Devel::Profiler", a drop-in Perl-only replacement for "Devel::DProf".
The usage is very slightly different in that instead of using the
special "-d:" flag, you pull "Devel::Profiler" in directly as a module
using "-M".
$> perl -MDevel::Profiler wordmatch -f perl5db.pl
<...multiple lines snipped...>
wordmatch report for perl5db.pl:
lines in file: 9428
words in file: 50243
words with special (non-word) characters: 20480
words with only special (non-word) characters: 7790
words with only consonants: 4801
words with only capital letters: 1316
words with only vowels: 1701
"Devel::Profiler" generates a tmon.out file which is compatible with
the "dprofpp" program, thus saving the construction of a dedicated
statistics reader program. "dprofpp" usage is therefore identical to
the above example.
$> dprofpp
Total Elapsed Time = 20.984 Seconds
User+System Time = 19.981 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c Name
49.0 9.792 14.509 251215 0.0000 0.0001 main::matches
24.4 4.887 4.887 260643 0.0000 0.0000 main::debug
0.25 0.049 0.049 1 0.0490 0.0490 main::report
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 Getopt::Long::GetOptions
0.00 0.000 0.000 2 0.0000 0.0000 Getopt::Long::ParseOptionSpec
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 Getopt::Long::FindOption
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 IO::File::new
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 IO::Handle::new
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 Symbol::gensym
0.00 0.000 0.000 1 0.0000 0.0000 IO::File::open
Interestingly we get slightly different results, which is mostly
because the algorithm which generates the report is different, even
though the output file format was allegedly identical. The elapsed,
user and system times are clearly showing the time it took for
"Devel::Profiler" to execute its own run, but the column listings feel
more accurate somehow than the ones we had earlier from "Devel::DProf".
The 102% figure has disappeared, for example. This is where we have to
use the tools at our disposal, and recognise their pros and cons,
before using them. Interestingly, the numbers of calls for each
subroutine are identical in the two reports, it's the percentages which
differ. As the author of "Devel::Profiler" writes:
...running HTML::Template's test suite under Devel::DProf shows
output() taking NO time but Devel::Profiler shows around 10% of the
time is in output(). I don't know which to trust but my gut tells me
something is wrong with Devel::DProf. HTML::Template::output() is a
big routine that's called for every test. Either way, something needs
fixing.
YMMV.
See also "Devel::Apache::Profiler" which hooks "Devel::Profiler" into
"mod_perl".
Devel::SmallProf
The "Devel::SmallProf" profiler examines the runtime of your Perl
program and produces a line-by-line listing to show how many times each
line was called, and how long each line took to execute. It is called
by supplying the familiar "-d" flag to Perl at runtime.
$> perl -d:SmallProf wordmatch -f perl5db.pl
<...multiple lines snipped...>
wordmatch report for perl5db.pl:
lines in file: 9428
words in file: 50243
words with special (non-word) characters: 20480
words with only special (non-word) characters: 7790
words with only consonants: 4801
words with only capital letters: 1316
words with only vowels: 1701
"Devel::SmallProf" writes its output into a file called smallprof.out,
by default. The format of the file looks like this:
<num> <time> <ctime> <line>:<text>
When the program has terminated, the output may be examined and sorted
using any standard text filtering utilities. Something like the
following may be sufficient:
$> cat smallprof.out | grep \d*: | sort -k3 | tac | head -n20
251215 1.65674 7.68000 75: if ( $word =~ /($regex)/ ) {
251215 0.03264 4.40000 79: debug("word: $i_wd ".($has ? 'matches' :
251215 0.02693 4.10000 81: return $has;
260643 0.02841 4.07000 128: if ( $debug ) {
260643 0.02601 4.04000 126: my $message = shift;
251215 0.02641 3.91000 73: my $has = 0;
251215 0.03311 3.71000 70: my $i_wd = shift;
251215 0.02699 3.69000 72: my $regex = shift;
251215 0.02766 3.68000 71: my $word = shift;
50243 0.59726 1.00000 59: $count{$i_LINES}{cons} =
50243 0.48175 0.92000 61: $count{$i_LINES}{spec} =
50243 0.00644 0.89000 56: my $i_cons = matches($i_word, $word,
50243 0.48837 0.88000 63: $count{$i_LINES}{caps} =
50243 0.00516 0.88000 58: my $i_caps = matches($i_word, $word, '^[(A-
50243 0.00631 0.81000 54: my $i_spec = matches($i_word, $word, '[^a-
50243 0.00496 0.80000 57: my $i_vows = matches($i_word, $word,
50243 0.00688 0.80000 53: $i_word++;
50243 0.48469 0.79000 62: $count{$i_LINES}{only} =
50243 0.48928 0.77000 60: $count{$i_LINES}{vows} =
50243 0.00683 0.75000 55: my $i_only = matches($i_word, $word, '^[^a-
You can immediately see a slightly different focus to the subroutine
profiling modules, and we start to see exactly which line of code is
taking the most time. That regex line is looking a bit suspicious, for
example. Remember that these tools are supposed to be used together,
there is no single best way to profile your code, you need to use the
best tools for the job.
See also "Apache::SmallProf" which hooks "Devel::SmallProf" into
"mod_perl".
Devel::FastProf
"Devel::FastProf" is another Perl line profiler. This was written with
a view to getting a faster line profiler, than is possible with for
example "Devel::SmallProf", because it's written in "C". To use
"Devel::FastProf", supply the "-d" argument to Perl:
$> perl -d:FastProf wordmatch -f perl5db.pl
<...multiple lines snipped...>
wordmatch report for perl5db.pl:
lines in file: 9428
words in file: 50243
words with special (non-word) characters: 20480
words with only special (non-word) characters: 7790
words with only consonants: 4801
words with only capital letters: 1316
words with only vowels: 1701
"Devel::FastProf" writes statistics to the file fastprof.out in the
current directory. The output file, which can be specified, can be
interpreted by using the "fprofpp" command-line program.
$> fprofpp | head -n20
# fprofpp output format is:
# filename:line time count: source
wordmatch:75 3.93338 251215: if ( $word =~ /($regex)/ ) {
wordmatch:79 1.77774 251215: debug("word: $i_wd ".($has ? 'matches' : 'does not match')." chars: /$regex/");
wordmatch:81 1.47604 251215: return $has;
wordmatch:126 1.43441 260643: my $message = shift;
wordmatch:128 1.42156 260643: if ( $debug ) {
wordmatch:70 1.36824 251215: my $i_wd = shift;
wordmatch:71 1.36739 251215: my $word = shift;
wordmatch:72 1.35939 251215: my $regex = shift;
Straightaway we can see that the number of times each line has been
called is identical to the "Devel::SmallProf" output, and the sequence
is only very slightly different based on the ordering of the amount of
time each line took to execute, "if ( $debug ) { " and "my $message =
shift;", for example. The differences in the actual times recorded
might be in the algorithm used internally, or it could be due to system
resource limitations or contention.
See also the DBIx::Profile which will profile database queries running
under the "DBIx::*" namespace.
Devel::NYTProf
"Devel::NYTProf" is the next generation of Perl code profiler, fixing
many shortcomings in other tools and implementing many cool features.
First of all it can be used as either a line profiler, a block or a
subroutine profiler, all at once. It can also use sub-microsecond
(100ns) resolution on systems which provide clock_gettime(). It can be
started and stopped even by the program being profiled. It's a one-
line entry to profile "mod_perl" applications. It's written in "c" and
is probably the fastest profiler available for Perl. The list of
coolness just goes on. Enough of that, let's see how to it works -
just use the familiar "-d" switch to plug it in and run the code.
$> perl -d:NYTProf wordmatch -f perl5db.pl
wordmatch report for perl5db.pl:
lines in file: 9427
words in file: 50243
words with special (non-word) characters: 20480
words with only special (non-word) characters: 7790
words with only consonants: 4801
words with only capital letters: 1316
words with only vowels: 1701
"NYTProf" will generate a report database into the file nytprof.out by
default. Human readable reports can be generated from here by using
the supplied "nytprofhtml" (HTML output) and "nytprofcsv" (CSV output)
programs. We've used the Unix system "html2text" utility to convert
the nytprof/index.html file for convenience here.
$> html2text nytprof/index.html
Performance Profile Index
For wordmatch
Run on Fri Sep 26 13:46:39 2008
Reported on Fri Sep 26 13:47:23 2008
Top 15 Subroutines -- ordered by exclusive time
|Calls |P |F |Inclusive|Exclusive|Subroutine |
| | | |Time |Time | |
|251215|5 |1 |13.09263 |10.47692 |main:: |matches |
|260642|2 |1 |2.71199 |2.71199 |main:: |debug |
|1 |1 |1 |0.21404 |0.21404 |main:: |report |
|2 |2 |2 |0.00511 |0.00511 |XSLoader:: |load (xsub) |
|14 |14|7 |0.00304 |0.00298 |Exporter:: |import |
|3 |1 |1 |0.00265 |0.00254 |Exporter:: |as_heavy |
|10 |10|4 |0.00140 |0.00140 |vars:: |import |
|13 |13|1 |0.00129 |0.00109 |constant:: |import |
|1 |1 |1 |0.00360 |0.00096 |FileHandle:: |import |
|3 |3 |3 |0.00086 |0.00074 |warnings::register::|import |
|9 |3 |1 |0.00036 |0.00036 |strict:: |bits |
|13 |13|13|0.00032 |0.00029 |strict:: |import |
|2 |2 |2 |0.00020 |0.00020 |warnings:: |import |
|2 |1 |1 |0.00020 |0.00020 |Getopt::Long:: |ParseOptionSpec|
|7 |7 |6 |0.00043 |0.00020 |strict:: |unimport |
For more information see the full list of 189 subroutines.
The first part of the report already shows the critical information
regarding which subroutines are using the most time. The next gives
some statistics about the source files profiled.
Source Code Files -- ordered by exclusive time then name
|Stmts |Exclusive|Avg. |Reports |Source File |
| |Time | | | |
|2699761|15.66654 |6e-06 |line . block . sub|wordmatch |
|35 |0.02187 |0.00062|line . block . sub|IO/Handle.pm |
|274 |0.01525 |0.00006|line . block . sub|Getopt/Long.pm |
|20 |0.00585 |0.00029|line . block . sub|Fcntl.pm |
|128 |0.00340 |0.00003|line . block . sub|Exporter/Heavy.pm |
|42 |0.00332 |0.00008|line . block . sub|IO/File.pm |
|261 |0.00308 |0.00001|line . block . sub|Exporter.pm |
|323 |0.00248 |8e-06 |line . block . sub|constant.pm |
|12 |0.00246 |0.00021|line . block . sub|File/Spec/Unix.pm |
|191 |0.00240 |0.00001|line . block . sub|vars.pm |
|77 |0.00201 |0.00003|line . block . sub|FileHandle.pm |
|12 |0.00198 |0.00016|line . block . sub|Carp.pm |
|14 |0.00175 |0.00013|line . block . sub|Symbol.pm |
|15 |0.00130 |0.00009|line . block . sub|IO.pm |
|22 |0.00120 |0.00005|line . block . sub|IO/Seekable.pm |
|198 |0.00085 |4e-06 |line . block . sub|warnings/register.pm|
|114 |0.00080 |7e-06 |line . block . sub|strict.pm |
|47 |0.00068 |0.00001|line . block . sub|warnings.pm |
|27 |0.00054 |0.00002|line . block . sub|overload.pm |
|9 |0.00047 |0.00005|line . block . sub|SelectSaver.pm |
|13 |0.00045 |0.00003|line . block . sub|File/Spec.pm |
|2701595|15.73869 | |Total |
|128647 |0.74946 | |Average |
| |0.00201 |0.00003|Median |
| |0.00121 |0.00003|Deviation |
Report produced by the NYTProf 2.03 Perl profiler, developed by Tim Bunce and
Adam Kaplan.
At this point, if you're using the html report, you can click through
the various links to bore down into each subroutine and each line of
code. Because we're using the text reporting here, and there's a whole
directory full of reports built for each source file, we'll just
display a part of the corresponding wordmatch-line.html file,
sufficient to give an idea of the sort of output you can expect from
this cool tool.
$> html2text nytprof/wordmatch-line.html
Performance Profile -- -block view-.-line view-.-sub view-
For wordmatch
Run on Fri Sep 26 13:46:39 2008
Reported on Fri Sep 26 13:47:22 2008
File wordmatch
Subroutines -- ordered by exclusive time
|Calls |P|F|Inclusive|Exclusive|Subroutine |
| | | |Time |Time | |
|251215|5|1|13.09263 |10.47692 |main::|matches|
|260642|2|1|2.71199 |2.71199 |main::|debug |
|1 |1|1|0.21404 |0.21404 |main::|report |
|0 |0|0|0 |0 |main::|BEGIN |
|Line|Stmts.|Exclusive|Avg. |Code |
| | |Time | | |
|1 | | | |#!/usr/bin/perl |
|2 | | | | |
| | | | |use strict; |
|3 |3 |0.00086 |0.00029|# spent 0.00003s making 1 calls to strict:: |
| | | | |import |
| | | | |use warnings; |
|4 |3 |0.01563 |0.00521|# spent 0.00012s making 1 calls to warnings:: |
| | | | |import |
|5 | | | | |
|6 | | | |=head1 NAME |
|7 | | | | |
|8 | | | |filewords - word analysis of input file |
<...snip...>
|62 |1 |0.00445 |0.00445|print report( %count ); |
| | | | |# spent 0.21404s making 1 calls to main::report|
|63 | | | | |
| | | | |# spent 23.56955s (10.47692+2.61571) within |
| | | | |main::matches which was called 251215 times, |
| | | | |avg 0.00005s/call: # 50243 times |
| | | | |(2.12134+0.51939s) at line 57 of wordmatch, avg|
| | | | |0.00005s/call # 50243 times (2.17735+0.54550s) |
|64 | | | |at line 56 of wordmatch, avg 0.00005s/call # |
| | | | |50243 times (2.10992+0.51797s) at line 58 of |
| | | | |wordmatch, avg 0.00005s/call # 50243 times |
| | | | |(2.12696+0.51598s) at line 55 of wordmatch, avg|
| | | | |0.00005s/call # 50243 times (1.94134+0.51687s) |
| | | | |at line 54 of wordmatch, avg 0.00005s/call |
| | | | |sub matches { |
<...snip...>
|102 | | | | |
| | | | |# spent 2.71199s within main::debug which was |
| | | | |called 260642 times, avg 0.00001s/call: # |
| | | | |251215 times (2.61571+0s) by main::matches at |
|103 | | | |line 74 of wordmatch, avg 0.00001s/call # 9427 |
| | | | |times (0.09628+0s) at line 50 of wordmatch, avg|
| | | | |0.00001s/call |
| | | | |sub debug { |
|104 |260642|0.58496 |2e-06 |my $message = shift; |
|105 | | | | |
|106 |260642|1.09917 |4e-06 |if ( $debug ) { |
|107 | | | |print STDERR "DBG: $message\n"; |
|108 | | | |} |
|109 | | | |} |
|110 | | | | |
|111 |1 |0.01501 |0.01501|exit 0; |
|112 | | | | |
Oodles of very useful information in there - this seems to be the way
forward.
See also "Devel::NYTProf::Apache" which hooks "Devel::NYTProf" into
"mod_perl".
SORTING
Perl modules are not the only tools a performance analyst has at their
disposal, system tools like "time" should not be overlooked as the next
example shows, where we take a quick look at sorting. Many books,
theses and articles, have been written about efficient sorting
algorithms, and this is not the place to repeat such work, there's
several good sorting modules which deserve taking a look at too:
"Sort::Maker", "Sort::Key" spring to mind. However, it's still
possible to make some observations on certain Perl specific
interpretations on issues relating to sorting data sets and give an
example or two with regard to how sorting large data volumes can effect
performance. Firstly, an often overlooked point when sorting large
amounts of data, one can attempt to reduce the data set to be dealt
with and in many cases grep() can be quite useful as a simple filter:
@data = sort grep { /$filter/ } @incoming
A command such as this can vastly reduce the volume of material to
actually sort through in the first place, and should not be too lightly
disregarded purely on the basis of its simplicity. The "KISS"
principle is too often overlooked - the next example uses the simple
system "time" utility to demonstrate. Let's take a look at an actual
example of sorting the contents of a large file, an apache logfile
would do. This one has over a quarter of a million lines, is 50M in
size, and a snippet of it looks like this:
# logfile
188.209-65-87.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be - - [08/Feb/2007:12:57:16 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
188.209-65-87.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be - - [08/Feb/2007:12:57:16 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
151.56.71.198 - - [08/Feb/2007:12:57:41 +0000] "GET /suse-on-vaio.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2858 "http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/sony.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1"
151.56.71.198 - - [08/Feb/2007:12:57:42 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.1" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net/suse-on-vaio.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1"
151.56.71.198 - - [08/Feb/2007:12:57:43 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1"
217.113.68.60 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:02:15 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
217.113.68.60 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:02:16 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.1" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
debora.to.isac.cnr.it - - [08/Feb/2007:13:03:58 +0000] "GET /suse-on-vaio.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2858 "http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/sony.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; Linux) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko)"
debora.to.isac.cnr.it - - [08/Feb/2007:13:03:58 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.1" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net/suse-on-vaio.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; Linux) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko)"
debora.to.isac.cnr.it - - [08/Feb/2007:13:03:58 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; Linux) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko)"
195.24.196.99 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:26:48 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 3309 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9"
195.24.196.99 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:26:58 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.0" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9"
195.24.196.99 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:26:59 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0" 404 209 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9"
crawl1.cosmixcorp.com - - [08/Feb/2007:13:27:57 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 179 "-" "voyager/1.0"
crawl1.cosmixcorp.com - - [08/Feb/2007:13:28:25 +0000] "GET /links.html HTTP/1.0" 200 3413 "-" "voyager/1.0"
fhm226.internetdsl.tpnet.pl - - [08/Feb/2007:13:37:32 +0000] "GET /suse-on-vaio.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2858 "http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/sony.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
fhm226.internetdsl.tpnet.pl - - [08/Feb/2007:13:37:34 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.1" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net/suse-on-vaio.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
80.247.140.134 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:57:35 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3309 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
80.247.140.134 - - [08/Feb/2007:13:57:37 +0000] "GET /data/css HTTP/1.1" 404 206 "http://www.rfi.net" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
pop.compuscan.co.za - - [08/Feb/2007:14:10:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3309 "-" "www.clamav.net"
livebot-207-46-98-57.search.live.com - - [08/Feb/2007:14:12:04 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 179 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
livebot-207-46-98-57.search.live.com - - [08/Feb/2007:14:12:04 +0000] "GET /html/oracle.html HTTP/1.0" 404 214 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
dslb-088-064-005-154.pools.arcor-ip.net - - [08/Feb/2007:14:12:15 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3309 "-" "www.clamav.net"
196.201.92.41 - - [08/Feb/2007:14:15:01 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3309 "-" "MOT-L7/08.B7.DCR MIB/2.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1"
The specific task here is to sort the 286,525 lines of this file by
Response Code, Query, Browser, Referring Url, and lastly Date. One
solution might be to use the following code, which iterates over the
files given on the command-line.
# sort-apache-log
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
use v5.36;
my @data;
LINE:
while ( <> ) {
my $line = $_;
if (
$line =~ m/^(
([\w\.\-]+) # client
\s*-\s*-\s*\[
([^]]+) # date
\]\s*"\w+\s*
(\S+) # query
[^"]+"\s*
(\d+) # status
\s+\S+\s+"[^"]*"\s+"
([^"]*) # browser
"
.*
)$/x
) {
my @chunks = split(/ +/, $line);
my $ip = $1;
my $date = $2;
my $query = $3;
my $status = $4;
my $browser = $5;
push(@data, [$ip, $date, $query, $status, $browser, $line]);
}
}
my @sorted = sort {
$a->[3] cmp $b->[3]
||
$a->[2] cmp $b->[2]
||
$a->[0] cmp $b->[0]
||
$a->[1] cmp $b->[1]
||
$a->[4] cmp $b->[4]
} @data;
foreach my $data ( @sorted ) {
print $data->[5];
}
exit 0;
When running this program, redirect "STDOUT" so it is possible to check
the output is correct from following test runs and use the system
"time" utility to check the overall runtime.
$> time ./sort-apache-log logfile > out-sort
real 0m17.371s
user 0m15.757s
sys 0m0.592s
The program took just over 17 wallclock seconds to run. Note the
different values "time" outputs, it's important to always use the same
one, and to not confuse what each one means.
Elapsed Real Time
The overall, or wallclock, time between when "time" was called, and
when it terminates. The elapsed time includes both user and system
times, and time spent waiting for other users and processes on the
system. Inevitably, this is the most approximate of the
measurements given.
User CPU Time
The user time is the amount of time the entire process spent on
behalf of the user on this system executing this program.
System CPU Time
The system time is the amount of time the kernel itself spent
executing routines, or system calls, on behalf of this process
user.
Running this same process as a "Schwarzian Transform" it is possible to
eliminate the input and output arrays for storing all the data, and
work on the input directly as it arrives too. Otherwise, the code
looks fairly similar:
# sort-apache-log-schwarzian
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
use v5.36;
print
map $_->[0] =>
sort {
$a->[4] cmp $b->[4]
||
$a->[3] cmp $b->[3]
||
$a->[1] cmp $b->[1]
||
$a->[2] cmp $b->[2]
||
$a->[5] cmp $b->[5]
}
map [ $_, m/^(
([\w\.\-]+) # client
\s*-\s*-\s*\[
([^]]+) # date
\]\s*"\w+\s*
(\S+) # query
[^"]+"\s*
(\d+) # status
\s+\S+\s+"[^"]*"\s+"
([^"]*) # browser
"
.*
)$/xo ]
=> <>;
exit 0;
Run the new code against the same logfile, as above, to check the new
time.
$> time ./sort-apache-log-schwarzian logfile > out-schwarz
real 0m9.664s
user 0m8.873s
sys 0m0.704s
The time has been cut in half, which is a respectable speed improvement
by any standard. Naturally, it is important to check the output is
consistent with the first program run, this is where the Unix system
"cksum" utility comes in.
$> cksum out-sort out-schwarz
3044173777 52029194 out-sort
3044173777 52029194 out-schwarz
BTW. Beware too of pressure from managers who see you speed a program
up by 50% of the runtime once, only to get a request one month later to
do the same again (true story) - you'll just have to point out you're
only human, even if you are a Perl programmer, and you'll see what you
can do...
LOGGING
An essential part of any good development process is appropriate error
handling with appropriately informative messages, however there exists
a school of thought which suggests that log files should be chatty, as
if the chain of unbroken output somehow ensures the survival of the
program. If speed is in any way an issue, this approach is wrong.
A common sight is code which looks something like this:
logger->debug( "A logging message via process-id: $$ INC: "
. Dumper(\%INC) )
The problem is that this code will always be parsed and executed, even
when the debug level set in the logging configuration file is zero.
Once the debug() subroutine has been entered, and the internal $debug
variable confirmed to be zero, for example, the message which has been
sent in will be discarded and the program will continue. In the
example given though, the "\%INC" hash will already have been dumped,
and the message string constructed, all of which work could be bypassed
by a debug variable at the statement level, like this:
logger->debug( "A logging message via process-id: $$ INC: "
. Dumper(\%INC) ) if $DEBUG;
This effect can be demonstrated by setting up a test script with both
forms, including a debug() subroutine to emulate typical logger()
functionality.
# ifdebug
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.36;
use Benchmark;
use Data::Dumper;
my $DEBUG = 0;
sub debug {
my $msg = shift;
if ( $DEBUG ) {
print "DEBUG: $msg\n";
}
};
timethese(100000, {
'debug' => sub {
debug( "A $0 logging message via process-id: $$" . Dumper(\%INC) )
},
'ifdebug' => sub {
debug( "A $0 logging message via process-id: $$" . Dumper(\%INC) ) if $DEBUG
},
});
Let's see what "Benchmark" makes of this:
$> perl ifdebug
Benchmark: timing 100000 iterations of constant, sub...
ifdebug: 0 wallclock secs ( 0.01 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.01 CPU) @ 10000000.00/s (n=100000)
(warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
debug: 14 wallclock secs (13.18 usr + 0.04 sys = 13.22 CPU) @ 7564.30/s (n=100000)
In the one case the code, which does exactly the same thing as far as
outputting any debugging information is concerned, in other words
nothing, takes 14 seconds, and in the other case the code takes one
hundredth of a second. Looks fairly definitive. Use a $DEBUG variable
BEFORE you call the subroutine, rather than relying on the smart
functionality inside it.
Logging if DEBUG (constant)
It's possible to take the previous idea a little further, by using a
compile time "DEBUG" constant.
# ifdebug-constant
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.36;
use Benchmark;
use Data::Dumper;
use constant
DEBUG => 0
;
sub debug {
if ( DEBUG ) {
my $msg = shift;
print "DEBUG: $msg\n";
}
};
timethese(100000, {
'debug' => sub {
debug( "A $0 logging message via process-id: $$" . Dumper(\%INC) )
},
'constant' => sub {
debug( "A $0 logging message via process-id: $$" . Dumper(\%INC) ) if DEBUG
},
});
Running this program produces the following output:
$> perl ifdebug-constant
Benchmark: timing 100000 iterations of constant, sub...
constant: 0 wallclock secs (-0.00 usr + 0.00 sys = -0.00 CPU) @ -7205759403792793600000.00/s (n=100000)
(warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
sub: 14 wallclock secs (13.09 usr + 0.00 sys = 13.09 CPU) @ 7639.42/s (n=100000)
The "DEBUG" constant wipes the floor with even the $debug variable,
clocking in at minus zero seconds, and generates a "warning: too few
iterations for a reliable count" message into the bargain. To see what
is really going on, and why we had too few iterations when we thought
we asked for 100000, we can use the very useful "B::Deparse" to inspect
the new code:
$> perl -MO=Deparse ifdebug-constant
use Benchmark;
use Data::Dumper;
use constant ('DEBUG', 0);
sub debug {
use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
0;
}
use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
timethese(100000, {'sub', sub {
debug "A $0 logging message via process-id: $$" . Dumper(\%INC);
}
, 'constant', sub {
0;
}
});
ifdebug-constant syntax OK
The output shows the constant() subroutine we're testing being replaced
with the value of the "DEBUG" constant: zero. The line to be tested
has been completely optimized away, and you can't get much more
efficient than that.
POSTSCRIPT
This document has provided several way to go about identifying hot-
spots, and checking whether any modifications have improved the runtime
of the code.
As a final thought, remember that it's not (at the time of writing)
possible to produce a useful program which will run in zero or negative
time and this basic principle can be written as: useful programs are
slow by their very definition. It is of course possible to write a
nearly instantaneous program, but it's not going to do very much,
here's a very efficient one:
$> perl -e 0
Optimizing that any further is a job for "p5p".
SEE ALSO
Further reading can be found using the modules and links below.
PERLDOCS
For example: "perldoc -f sort".
perlfaq4(1).
perlfork(1), perlfunc(1), perlretut(1), perlthrtut(1).
threads(1).
MAN PAGES
time(1).
MODULES
It's not possible to individually showcase all the performance related
code for Perl here, naturally, but here's a short list of modules from
the CPAN which deserve further attention.
Apache::DProf(3)
Apache::SmallProf(3)
Benchmark(3)
DBIx::Profile(3)
Devel::AutoProfiler(3)
Devel::DProf(3)
Devel::DProfLB(3)
Devel::FastProf(3)
Devel::GraphVizProf(3)
Devel::NYTProf(3)
Devel::NYTProf::Apache(3)
Devel::Profiler(3)
Devel::Profile(3)
Devel::Profit(3)
Devel::SmallProf(3)
Devel::WxProf(3)
POE::Devel::Profiler(3)
Sort::Key(3)
Sort::Maker(3)
URLS
Very useful online reference material:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120515021937/http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/P/Fast_Enough/
https://web.archive.org/web/20050706081718/http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-optperl.html
https://perlbuzz.com/2007/11/14/bind_output_variables_in_dbi_for_speed_and_safety/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_analysis
http://apache.perl.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html
http://perlgolf.sourceforge.net/
http://www.sysarch.com/Perl/sort_paper.html
AUTHOR
Richard Foley <richard.foley@rfi.net> Copyright (c) 2008
perl v5.38.2 2023-11-28 perlperf(1)
perl 5.38.2 - Generated Sat Nov 30 13:44:53 CST 2024