As noted in my last post, I was able to get a bit of a speed boost based on observations made as a result of code profiling.
In general, if I want to see if one piece of code is faster than another, I use Benchmark. Benchmark is shipped as part of the core set of modules, so there's no need to load up CPAN to get started. Its simplest usage, and the one i prefer looks something like this:
use Benchmark ();
Benchmark::cmpthese( $count, {
Foo1 => sub {
# code to do Foo1 here
},
Foo2 => sub {
# code to do Foo1 here
},
} );
Of note is that $count can be negative, which will then signify how many seconds to run instead of the number of times. The result looks like this:
Rate Foo1 Foo2
Foo1 108665/s -- -38%
Foo2 175460/s 61% --
It's pretty easy to see that Foo2 was faster. Using the above it was easy for me to test the XS-based ANSI parser vs the pure Perl version.
4k worth of ANSI over 10 seconds yields the following:
Rate PP XS
PP 15.7/s -- -96%
XS 379/s 2316% --
For giggles, i tested it against a 33k ANSI, giving:
Rate PP XS
PP 2.23/s -- -96%
XS 58.7/s 2528% --
Looks like a success to me!
