On Sat, 31 Aug 2019 at 20:37, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

> On 31 Aug 2019, at 13:27, Richard Kenneth Eng <horrido.hobbies@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/vw-pharo.html
>
> Is VisualWorks really faster than Pharo? Why???

The Pharo code is single threaded, single core, while the VW code uses something called MatriX.VirtualMachines to create workers that run on multiple cores.

Presumably that makes a huge difference.

Also, such parallelism is easy for benchmarks that can be split in independent tasks, real world code is a completely different story.

Basically, this is not the same code that is being compared.

Thanks Sven for this insight.�� It wold not have occurred to me.��

Looking at the results with new eyes, I notice its apparent in the sum activity of the four processors - averaging around 103% (including non-Pharo tasks) for Pharo testing

and much more for VisualWorks.�� Normalizing CPU usage I get these comparative results (smaller is faster VW).

0.86 fasta
0.93 binary-trees
1.02 fannkuch-redux
1.02 reverse-complement
1.08 pidigits
1.09 spectral-norm
1.44 n-body
1.49 k-nucleotide

So VW is 20% faster on some, 40% slower on others and most are pretty close.

Although such a Matrix feature would be advantageous for some domains - just need someone to invent similar for Pharo.

cheers -ben