Performance

This page gives an overview, of what to currently expect in terms of performance from Nuitka. It’s a work in progress and is updated as we go. The current focus for performance measurements is Python 2.7, but 3.x is going to follow later.

pystone results

The results are the top value from this kind of output, running pystone 1000 times and taking the minimal value. The idea is that the fastest run is most meaningful, and eliminates usage spikes.

echo "Uncompiled Python2"
for i in {1..100}; do BENCH=1 python2 tests/benchmarks/pystone.py ; done | sort -rn | head -n 1
python2 -m nuitka --lto=yes --pgo tests/benchmarks/pystone.py
echo "Compiled Python2"
for i in {1..100}; do BENCH=1 ./pystone.bin ; done | sort -n | head -rn 1

echo "Uncompiled Python3"
for i in {1..100}; do BENCH=1 python3 tests/benchmarks/pystone3.py ; done | sort -rn | head -n 1
python3 -m nuitka --lto=yes --pgo tests/benchmarks/pystone3.py
echo "Compiled Python3"
for i in {1..100}; do BENCH=1 ./pystone3.bin ; done | sort -rn | head -n 1

Python

Uncompiled

Compiled LTO

Compiled PGO

Debian Python 2.7

137497.87 (1.000)

460995.20 (3.353)

503681.91 (3.663)

Nuitka Python 2.7

144074.78 (1.048)

479271.51 (3.486)

511247.44 (3.718)

Report issues or bugs

Should you encounter any issues, bugs, or ideas, please visit the Nuitka bug tracker and report them.

Best practices for reporting bugs:

  • Please always include the following information in your report, for the underlying Python version. You can easily copy&paste this into your report. It does contain more information than you think. Do not write something manually. You may always add, of course,

    python -m nuitka --version

  • Try to make your example minimal. That is, try to remove code that does not contribute to the issue as much as possible. Ideally, come up with a small reproducing program that illustrates the issue, using print with different results when the program runs compiled or native.

  • If the problem occurs spuriously (i.e. not each time), try to set the environment variable PYTHONHASHSEED to 0, disabling hash randomization. If that makes the problem go away, try increasing in steps of 1 to a hash seed value that makes it happen every time, include it in your report.

  • Do not include the created code in your report. Given proper input, it’s redundant, and it’s not likely that I will look at it without the ability to change the Python or Nuitka source and re-run it.

  • Do not send screenshots of text, that is bad and lazy. Instead, capture text outputs from the console.