Victor: "FYI I wrote an article about this issue: https://haypo.github.io/analysis-python-performance-issue.html Sadly, it seems like I was just lucky when adding __attribute__((hot)) fixed the issue, because call_method is slow again!"

I upgraded speed-python server (running benchmarks) to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to support PGO compilation. I removed all old benchmark results and ran again benchmarks with LTO+PGO. It seems like benchmark results are much better now.

I'm not sure anymore that _Py_HOT_FUNCTION is really useful to get stable benchmarks, but it may help code placement a little bit. I don't think that it hurts, so I suggest to keep it. Since benchmarks were still unstable with _Py_HOT_FUNCTION, I'm not interested to continue to tag more functions with _Py_HOT_FUNCTION. I will now focus on LTO+PGO for stable benchmarks, and ignore small performance difference when PGO is not used.

I close this issue now.