There are lies, damned lies and benchmarks.
-- after Benjamin Disraeli
Here are the results of some performance benchmarking tests run on a number of different Common Lisp implementations. The tests run include
- the well-known Gabriel benchmarks
- hashtable exercising
-
READ-LINEexercising - mathematical functions: factorial, fibonnaci, ackermann's number
- some bignum intensive code from Bruno Haible
- various aspects of CLOS: time taken to compile and execute
DEFCLASSforms which create a class hierarchy, instance creation time, time taken to compile and executeDEFMETHODforms, execution of method combinations, both with and without:aftermethods. - ?various operations on arrays, bitvectors and strings.
Except for the CLOS code, timings do not include compilation time.
The garbage collector is run before each test to try to make the
timings more repeatable. Remember that the only real benchmark is
your application: this code is only representative of real-life
programs to a limited extent. For certain targets, we assume that the
times reported by GET-INTERNAL-RUN-TIME and GET-INTERNAL-REAL-TIME are accurate.
The code for these performance benchmarks can be downloaded from www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads.
Here is an example of the type of results you can obtain, for x86 and SPARC platforms. To interpret these numbers: the number in the Reference column is a number of seconds taken to execute that test. The other numbers are the relative performance of that implementation, so for example a number of 1.3 means 30% slower than the reference implementation. A number of -1 means that the corresponding test was not run on that implementation, either because it does not support the given feature (certain types of method combination for CLISP, for instance), or because of implementation limits (heap size limit on LispWorks Personal, for example).
,---- Pentium III@1.1GHz, 512MB RAM --- | | Benchmark Reference 18d 18dsm CLISP SBCL Poplog | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | BOYER 1.50 0.73 0.74 5.61 1.01 3.03 | BROWSE 0.61 0.74 0.74 2.54 1.26 2.85 | DDerviv 0.66 0.52 0.53 2.14 1.15 1.62 | Deriv 1.29 0.50 0.48 2.05 1.10 1.26 | DESTRUCTIVE 1.05 0.91 0.95 3.17 1.13 3.38 | DIV2-TEST-1 1.09 0.51 0.51 1.66 1.07 1.29 | DIV2-TEST-2 0.54 0.52 0.61 1.69 1.09 1.31 | FFT 0.19 1.00 1.00 37.00 1.21 91.21 | FRPOLY/FIXNUM 0.54 0.87 0.89 6.85 1.09 3.00 | FRPOLY/BIGNUM 1.30 0.73 0.74 2.44 1.08 1.39 | FRPOLY/FLOAT 0.54 0.76 0.78 4.41 1.06 2.11 | PUZZLE 0.68 0.99 0.99 25.09 9.35 27.93 | TAK 0.79 0.97 0.97 9.08 1.25 3.10 | CTAK 0.73 1.00 0.97 6.49 1.05 4.84 | TRTAK 0.79 0.97 0.97 9.13 1.25 3.11 | TAKL 1.37 1.01 1.00 7.70 1.27 4.02 | STAK 0.96 1.02 1.02 7.07 1.08 1.50 | FPRINT 1.21 0.92 0.82 1.06 2.28 4.17 | TRAVERSE 2.00 0.94 0.99 11.45 1.50 5.42 | TRIANGLE 1.70 1.01 1.01 17.58 1.28 23.19 | RICHARDS 0.53 1.00 0.98 21.26 1.00 6.47 | FACTORIAL 0.37 0.54 0.57 0.81 1.14 0.62 | FIB 0.33 1.00 1.00 5.30 1.06 1.18 | RATIOS 2.24 0.96 0.96 0.12 0.96 1.81 | BIGNUM/ELEM-100-1000 1.06 0.92 0.97 0.08 0.97 2.27 | BIGNUM/ELEM-1000-100 4.99 0.99 0.99 0.05 0.93 2.14 | BIGNUM/ELEM-10000-1 5.19 1.01 1.00 0.05 0.92 12.90 | BIGNUM/PARI-100-10 1.21 0.99 1.02 0.02 0.95 0.04 | BIGNUM/PARI-200-5 14.30 0.99 1.00 0.01 0.92 0.01 | HASH-STRINGS 1.15 0.84 0.69 3.25 0.99 30.89 | HASH-INTEGERS 0.44 0.80 0.66 2.75 1.27 6.95 | BOEHM-GC 6.41 0.47 0.46 4.10 1.12 1.53 | DEFLATE 1.16 1.00 1.02 6.34 1.52 5.53 | CLOS/defclass 1.75 0.90 0.92 0.53 2.53 0.06 | CLOS/defmethod 8.73 0.77 0.71 0.02 2.17 0.00 | CLOS/instantiate 6.42 0.57 0.54 0.96 0.99 3.57 | CLOS/methodcalls 8.17 0.42 0.44 1.01 0.90 3.93 | CLOS/method+after 10.76 0.84 0.77 0.47 2.42 2.01 | CLOS/complex-methods 0.29 1.07 1.14 -1.00 6.17 -1.00 | 1D-ARRAYS 2.44 0.81 0.79 5.68 1.39 15.75 | 2D-ARRAYS 11.28 0.99 0.89 3.45 4.39 6.04 | BITVECTORS 2.01 0.82 0.81 0.60 0.98 -1.00 | FILL-STRINGS 6.83 0.88 0.82 1.16 3.77 27.38 | fill-strings/adjustable 14.18 0.99 0.87 1.36 1.73 118.49 | BENCH-STRING-CONCAT 5.79 1.88 1.62 -1.00 2.75 -1.00 | | Reference implementation: CMU Common Lisp 18c | Impl 18d: CMU Common Lisp 18d-pre, level-1 built 2002-04-08 on melbourne | Impl 18dsm: CMU Common Lisp 18d-pre-small, level-1 built 2002-04-08 on sydney | Impl CLISP: CLISP 2.27.2 (released 2001-10-05) (built 3222523548) (memory 3222523674) | Impl SBCL : SBCL 0.7.1.22 (from debian testing) | Impl Poplog: Sussex Poplog Common Lisp 2.0 | Linux melbourne 2.4.17 #2 SMP Wed Feb 6 11:35:03 CET 2002 i686 unknown | (declaim (optimize (speed 3) (space 0) (safety 1) (debug 0) (compilation-speed 0))) `---- ,---- UltraSPARCIIe at 500MHz, 640MB RAM, SunOS 5.8 --- | | Benchmark Reference CMU C CLISP | ----------------------------------------------------- | BOYER 3.98 0.91 8.03 | BROWSE 1.72 0.91 2.85 | DDerviv 2.02 0.75 3.21 | Deriv 3.63 0.81 3.13 | DESTRUCTIVE 3.11 1.01 4.18 | DIV2-TEST-1 2.19 0.83 3.92 | DIV2-TEST-2 1.12 0.82 3.85 | FFT 0.74 1.03 28.86 | FRPOLY/FIXNUM 1.87 1.01 7.89 | FRPOLY/BIGNUM 4.59 1.29 3.07 | FRPOLY/FLOAT 1.65 0.96 5.68 | PUZZLE 2.07 0.95 30.62 | CTAK 2.74 1.01 9.04 | TAK 1.84 1.00 14.08 | RTAK 1.84 1.01 13.95 | TAKL 3.37 1.01 11.63 | STAK 2.32 1.01 8.87 | FPRINT 4.17 1.02 1.12 | TRAVERSE 5.84 0.99 13.74 | TRIANGLE 5.53 0.86 15.57 | CASCOR 10.53 0.73 52.81 | RICHARDS 2.35 0.94 22.46 | FACTORIAL 1.46 1.48 2.88 | FIB 0.94 0.99 6.71 | BIGNUM/ELEM-100-1000 2.80 1.24 0.28 | BIGNUM/ELEM-1000-100 10.14 1.19 0.44 | BIGNUM/ELEM-10000-1 11.38 1.35 0.41 | BIGNUM/PARI-100-10 2.76 1.15 0.09 | BIGNUM/PARI-200-5 27.19 1.06 0.05 | READ-LINE 3.39 1.06 1.19 | HASH-STRINGS 5.42 1.20 2.19 | HASH-INTEGERS 1.61 0.76 2.00 | BOEHM-GC 19.97 0.76 4.14 | CLOS/defclass 4.78 1.01 0.81 | CLOS/defmethod 27.61 0.89 0.03 | CLOS/instantiate 20.93 0.85 1.28 | CLOS/methodcalls 23.62 1.08 1.94 | CLOS/method+after 33.70 1.07 0.78 | CLOS/complex-methods 1.41 0.92 -1.00 | 1D-ARRAYS 10.77 0.92 3.51 | 2D-ARRAYS 56.66 1.40 2.61 | BITVECTORS 5.35 0.86 0.42 | FILL-STRINGS 18.88 1.07 0.97 | fill-strings/adjustable 45.09 1.46 1.41 | BENCH-STRING-CONCAT 48.10 0.90 -1.00 | | Reference implementation: CMU Common Lisp 18c, Built 2000-11-27 | Impl CMU C: CMU Common Lisp 18d-pre, level-1 built 2001-12-12 on liszt | Impl CLISP: CLISP 2.27.2 (released 2001-10-05) (built on moustacho) | SunOS eagles 5.8 Generic_108528-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100 `----
Further information
- refer to the sections on timing and benchmarking in Chapter 5.16 of the CMUCL User's Manual.
- Ken Anderson's performance page.
- the article Benchmarking Implementations of Functional Languages with Pseudoknot, a Float-Intensive Benchmark.
- Information on benchmarking GCC.