[erlang-questions] On a positive Erlang performance note...

[Edwin Fine]

I've previously expressed some disappointment in Erlang's worst-case
scenario SMP performance (lots of messages, very little done with each
message, communicating parallel SMP processes).

Now, to balance that out, I want to praise Erlang (and HiPE) for a virtually
linear SMP speedup in a character classification test I ran.

Using sequential and parallelized code (rpc:pmap) and a HiPE-compiled module
on an Intel Q6600/Ubuntu/8GB/R12B-4, which classified every byte of a 40MB
file into character classes (e.g. punct, blank), the following results were
achieved:

Sequential: 18817812 bytes/second
Parallelized: 74937454 bytes/second
Speedup: 3.98 (on a 4-core system).

That's extremely close to linear and is pretty impressive. I found HiPE gave
about a 10x speedup over BEAM. The results are with HiPE and exclude the
time taken to load the file into a binary.

Kudos to Erlang and HiPE.

I had to do a bit of ugly code to get this level of performance, though
(using dicts and arrays to keep the counts was just too slow - I fell to
using a separate parameter for each of the 12 counts).

The outputs follow (ascsp is something I added - counts ASCII SP (32) chars,
and the purpose of '8bit' is self-evident). The other character classes are
defined as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression .

Regards,
Ed

PS In the unlikely event that someone wants the code, I will gladly post it
if asked.
------------

31> c(charclass,[native]).
{ok,charclass}
32> charclass:bm("/home/efine/erlang/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz")
32> .
*** Completed run using classify_binary ***
File "/home/efine/erlang/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz" size is 42195557 bytes
Classified 42195557 characters
Breakdown:
[{'8bit',21296511},
 {alnum,10079032},
 {alpha,8454737},
 {ascsp,158524},
 {blank,318577},
 {cntrl,5379355},
 {digit,1624295},
 {lower,4269350},
 {print,15519691},
 {punct,5282135},
 {space,963777},
 {upper,4185387}]
Speed = 18817812 bytes/sec (0.05314113995461655 us/byte)
ok
33> charclass:bm_par("/home/efine/erlang/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz").
*** Completed run using par_classify_binary ***
File "/home/efine/erlang/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz" size is 42195557 bytes
Classified 42195557 characters
Breakdown:
[{'8bit',21296511},
 {alnum,10079032},
 {alpha,8454737},
 {ascsp,158524},
 {blank,318577},
 {cntrl,5379355},
 {digit,1624295},
 {lower,4269350},
 {print,15519691},
 {punct,5282135},
 {space,963777},
 {upper,4185387}]
Speed = 74937454 bytes/sec (0.013344461835164304 us/byte)
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