[Psyco-checkins] CVS: psyco/doc psycoguide.tex,1.1,1.2

[Armin R. <ar...@us...>]

Update of /cvsroot/psyco/psyco/doc
In directory sc8-pr-cvs1:/tmp/cvs-serv9056/doc

Modified Files:
	psycoguide.tex 
Log Message:
almost-done version 1.0.0b1

Index: psycoguide.tex
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RCS file: /cvsroot/psyco/psyco/doc/psycoguide.tex,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
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*** psycoguide.tex	17 Jan 2003 14:39:13 -0000	1.1
--- psycoguide.tex	17 Mar 2003 08:44:15 -0000	1.2
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*** 10,16 ****
  }
  
! \date{\today}                   % December 2002
  
! \release{1.0}                   % release version
  
  \makeindex
--- 10,16 ----
  }
  
! \date{March 15, 2003}
  
! \release{1.0.0b1}                   % release version
  
  \makeindex
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  Psyco is a Python extension module which can massively speed up the execution of any Python code.
  
! \strong{This document is an evolving Draft.}
  
  \end{abstract}
--- 31,35 ----
  Psyco is a Python extension module which can massively speed up the execution of any Python code.
  
! %\strong{This document is an evolving Draft.}
  
  \end{abstract}
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--- 186,241 ----
  
  Unlike \function{psyco.bind}, \function{psyco.proxy} does not affect your original function at all, but only creates a Psyco-accelerated copy of it (a ``proxy'').  Useful if you only want to use Psyco at a very specific moment.  One can also argue that \code{f=psyco.proxy(f)} looks more Pythonic than \code{psyco.bind(f)}.
+ 
+ 
+ \section{Zope's TAL: a real example with benchmarks}
+ 
+ As an example of a good real-life candidate for Psyco acceleration, I chose \strong{TAL}, the simpler of the two templating languages of Zope (\url{http://www.zope.org}).  TAL is an extension of HTML in which you can write templates which are used to generate real HTML pages dynamically.  The translation from templates to real pages is a typical data-manipulation algorithm that is much faster in C than in Python, but much more obfuscated too.  TAL is currently implemented in Python only.
+ 
+ For these tests, we will use the file \file{TAL.markbench.py} of a Zope 2 installation (if you did not install Zope, the file is in the \file{lib/python} subdirectory of the source archive).  You may have to create a file named \file{.path} to be able to run \file{markbench.py}, as explained when you first try to run it.
+ 
+ On a Dual Pentium Linux running Python 2.2.2, using the Zope 2.6 distribution, I get the following times:
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ \fixme
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ If I add the following line at the top of \file{markbench.py} the times drop massively --- the longest-running tests run as much as three times faster!
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ import psyco; psyco.log(); psyco.full()
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ Results:
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ \fixme
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ Here you see in the DTML test the first rule about Psyco: some code is obviously not seen by Psyco at all.  In other words for some reason this code runs in the normal interpreter only.  There are a lot of potential reasons for this, which range from Psyco failing to ``steal'' the code from Python before the latter executes it to code using unsupported constructs (see appendix \ref{unsupported}).
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ import psyco; psyco.log(); psyco.profile()
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ Results:
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ \fixme
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ If you use the profiler instead of compiling everything, the small tests won't run much faster, but the long-running ones will be about as fast as above.  It means that the profiler is a powerful tool that can be useful on arbitrarily large programs.  However, in the case of a large program in which you know where most of the processor time is spent, you can choose to selectively compile this part:
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ from TALInterpreter import TALInterpreter
+ import psyco; psyco.log(); psyco.bind(TALInterpreter)
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ Results:
+ 
+ \begin{verbatim}
+ \fixme
+ \end{verbatim}
+ 
+ Here you can see that only the TAL test is accelerated.  If you have a Zope server using TAL, you could try to add the above two lines to it.  You may get very interesting speed-ups for a very reasonable memory overweight (please tell me about it --- there is no real Zope server I can play with myself)!