Here is a patch to speedup utf8 decoding. On a 64-bit build, the maximum
speedup is around 30%, and on a 32-bit build around 15%. (*)

The patch may look disturbingly trivial, and I haven't studied the
assembler output, but I think it is explained by the fact that having a
separate loop counter breaks the register dependencies (when the 's'
pointer was incremented, other operations had to wait for the
incrementation to be committed).

[side note: utf8 encoding is still much faster than decoding, but it may
be because it allocates a smaller object, regardless of the iteration count]

The same principle can probably be applied to the other decoding
functions in unicodeobject.c, but first I wanted to know whether the
principle is ok to apply. Marc-André, what is your take?


(*) the benchmark I used is:

./python -m timeit -s "import
codecs;c=codecs.utf_8_decode;s=b'abcde'*1000" "c(s)"

More complex input also gets a speedup, albeit a smaller one (~10%):

./python -m timeit -s "import
codecs;c=codecs.utf_8_decode;s=b'\xc3\xa9\xe7\xb4\xa2'*1000" "c(s)"

Can you please upload it to Rietveld?

I'm skeptical about changes that merely rely on the compiler's register
allocator to do a better job. This kind of change tends to pessimize the
code for other compilers, and also may pessimize it for future versions
of the same compiler.

As I said I don't think it's due to register allocation, but simply
avoiding register write-to-read dependencies by using separate variables
for the loop count and the pointer. I'm gonna try under Windows (in a
virtual machine, but it shouldn't make much difference since the
workload is CPU-bound).

I've open a Rietveld issue here: http://codereview.appspot.com/11681

Ha, the patch makes things slower on MSVC. The patch can probably be
rejected, then.

(and interestingly, MSVC produces 40% faster code than gcc on my
mini-bench, despite the virtual machine overhead)

On 2009-01-07 16:25, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> New submission from Antoine Pitrou <pitrou@free.fr>:
> 
> Here is a patch to speedup utf8 decoding. On a 64-bit build, the maximum
> speedup is around 30%, and on a 32-bit build around 15%. (*)
> 
> The patch may look disturbingly trivial, and I haven't studied the
> assembler output, but I think it is explained by the fact that having a
> separate loop counter breaks the register dependencies (when the 's'
> pointer was incremented, other operations had to wait for the
> incrementation to be committed).
> 
> [side note: utf8 encoding is still much faster than decoding, but it may
> be because it allocates a smaller object, regardless of the iteration count]
> 
> The same principle can probably be applied to the other decoding
> functions in unicodeobject.c, but first I wanted to know whether the
> principle is ok to apply. Marc-André, what is your take?

I'm +1 on anything that makes codecs faster :-)

However, the patch should be checked with some other compilers
as well, e.g. using MS VC++.

> (*) the benchmark I used is:
> 
> ./python -m timeit -s "import
> codecs;c=codecs.utf_8_decode;s=b'abcde'*1000" "c(s)"
> 
> More complex input also gets a speedup, albeit a smaller one (~10%):
> 
> ./python -m timeit -s "import
> codecs;c=codecs.utf_8_decode;s=b'\xc3\xa9\xe7\xb4\xa2'*1000" "c(s)"

Reopening and attaching a more ambitious patch, based on the
optimization of runs of ASCII characters. This time the speedup is much
more impressive, up to 75% faster on pure ASCII input -- actually faster
than latin1.

The worst case (tight interleaving of ASCII and non-ASCII chars) shows a
8% slowdown.

(performance measured with gcc and MSVC)

Very nice! It seems that you can get slightly faster by not copying the
initial char first: 's' is often already aligned at the beginning of the
string, but not after the first copy... Attached patch
(utf8decode4.patch) changes this and may enter the fast loop on the
first character.

Does this idea apply to the encode function as well?

> Attached patch
> (utf8decode4.patch) changes this and may enter the fast loop on the
> first character.

Thanks!

> Does this idea apply to the encode function as well?

Probably, although with less efficiency (a long can hold 1, 2 or 4
unicode characters depending on the build).
The unrolling part also applies to simple codecs such as latin1.
Unrolling PyUnicode_DecodeLatin1 a bit (4 copies per iteration) makes it
twice faster on non-tiny strings. I'll experiment with utf16.

Attached patch adds acceleration for latin1 and utf16 decoding as well. 

All three codecs (utf8, utf16, latin1) are now in the same ballpark
performance-wise on favorable input: on my machine, they are able to
decode at almost 1GB/s.

(unpatched, it is between 150 and 500MB/s. depending on the codec)

(PS : performance measured on UCS-2 and UCS-4 builds with gcc, and under
Windows with MSVC)

Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Antoine Pitrou <pitrou@free.fr> added the comment:
> 
> Attached patch adds acceleration for latin1 and utf16 decoding as well. 
> 
> All three codecs (utf8, utf16, latin1) are now in the same ballpark
> performance-wise on favorable input: on my machine, they are able to
> decode at almost 1GB/s.
> 
> (unpatched, it is between 150 and 500MB/s. depending on the codec)
> 
> Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file12655/decode5.patch

A few style comments:

 * please use indented #pre-processor directives whenever possible, e.g.
   #if
   # define
   #else
   # define
   #endif

 * the conditions should only accept SIZE_OF_LONG == 4 and 8 and
   fail with an #error for any other value

 * you should use unsigned longs instead of signed ones

 * please use spaces around arithmetic operators, e.g. not a+b, but
   a + b

 * when calling functions with lots of parameters, put each parameter on
   a new line (e.g. for unicode_decode_call_errorhandler())

Please also add a comment somewhere to the bit masks explaining what
they do and how they are used. Verbose comments are always good to
have when doing optimizations such as these. Have a look at the
dictionary implementation for what I mean by this.

Thanks,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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Marc-Andre, this patch should address your comments.

Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Antoine Pitrou <pitrou@free.fr> added the comment:
> 
> Marc-Andre, this patch should address your comments.
> 
> Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file12656/decode6.patch

Thanks. Much better !

BTW: I'd also change the variable name "word" to something
different, e.g. bitmap or just data. It looks too much like
a reserved word (which it isn't) ;-)

I committed the patch with the last suggested change (word -> data) in
py3k (r68483). I don't intend to backport it to trunk, but I suppose it
wouldn't be too much work to do.