[armedbear-devel] Performance improvement special binding read/write

[Erik Huelsmann]

Committed in r12275.

Bye,

Erik.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Last weekend, I ran Maxima tests since some time again. I don't
> remember the older performance figures, although I remember the total
> test suite - possibly performance tuned - to take 3300seconds before.
> Last weekend, it was 3900seconds, giving me a feeling of performance
> regression. So I decided to take another look.
>
> I found two things, one of which is that we still have slow special
> binding value lookup. Peter Graves suggested some time ago that we
> switch to the same scheme used by SBCL and CCL because he found that
> XCL benefitted ~10% on his tests when he made the same switch.
>
> The scheme used by SBCL/CCL differs from the one used by ABCL in the
> way the "active" binding is being accessed. ABCL manages all bindings
> as a linked list, with the most recent one as the active one. This
> means O(n) access time on the number of special bindings.
>
> In SBCL/CCL, the active binding is stored in an array, with a linked
> list to record which values to restore when unwinding the binding.
> Upon restore, this solution takes more cycles than our solution: we
> simply change the head of the linked list, whereas the SBCL/CCL
> solution needs to set all the array elements.
>
>
> Running the application which we know tests special bindings
> performance the best [Maxima], I see a strong performance improvement:
> 3900 seconds before and 2300 seconds after the change. Performance
> improved by ~40%!
>
> I'll commit this change after cleaning up.
>
>
> Bye,
>
> Erik.
>