People should stop getting hung up about benchmarks numbers and instead should first think about what they are trying to *achieve*. FP performance in pure Python does not seem like an important goal in itself. Also, some benchmarks may show variations which are randomly correlated with a patch (e.g. before of different code placement by the compiler interfering with instruction cache wayness). It is important not to block a patch because some random benchmark on some random machine shows an unexpected slowdown.

That said, both of Serhiy's patches are probably ok IMO.