[Nottingham] Linux VM performance

[Daryl]

WARNING: Random meandering follows...

I have a talk tomorrow evening. I have absolutely nothing to show yet.

However, I have been having AWESOME (I spend too much time around an
American) fun tidying up and rejigging my performance analysis. I did a
talk on this last year.

It's a simple scheduling algorithm so all tight loops and floating point
maths. It SHOULD suit JITs very well. The code size is small enough that it
will fit into CPU caches.

The code is as identical as possible across languages. I'm generally
avoiding code that is too idiomatic; however, I'm using immutable
structures where possible and recursive techniques in those languages that
support it. I'm writing everything out to the terminal to stop those clever
lazy languages avoiding calculating anything (I'm looking at you Haskell!)

Results below:

Blitzmax: 0:24.87 real  23.99 user  0.24 sys
Monkey-X: 0:15.84 real  15.17 user  0.24 sys
 C# Mono: 1:01.38 real  58.84 user  0.83 sys
     C++: 0:12.73 real  12.05 user  0.21 sys
 Clojure: 1:01.01 real  62.52 user  1.01 sys
       D: 0:32.22 real  31.98 user  0.15 sys
 F# Mono: 0:58.05 real  57.32 user  0.52 sys
      Go: 0:23.41 real  23.19 user  0.17 sys
 Haskell: 0:38.96 real  38.27 user  0.50 sys
    Java: 0:30.41 real  30.43 user  0.25 sys
   OCaml: 0:43.50 real  43.19 user  0.20 sys
 Python2: 4:46.03 real  282.67 user  1.43 sys
 Python3: 4:26.41 real  264.80 user  0.72 sys
   PyPy2: 0:16.76 real  16.11 user  0.20 sys
   PyPy3: 0:32.44 real  31.34 user  0.34 sys
    Ruby: 2:31.46 real  149.54 user  0.54 sys
    Rust: 0:12.47 real  11.94 user  0.14 sys
   Scala: 0:31.63 real  31.25 user  0.66 sys

Ignoring the first two rows (which are proprietary game BASICs, but great
fun for chucking together graphical demos), then the most interesting
results are that Rust is quicker than Boost C++ and that PyPy is very
nearly as quick as both.

I'm not comparing against .NET C# and F#. I would expect those to perform
much quicker, but of course they don't run on Mac OS/Unix/Linux! I would
imagine C# would be in the 20-25 second range.

Anyway. that wasn't the point of my email. I was setting up a VirtualBox VM
to package all this up and so installed the latest Ubuntu (as I like to try
new shiny stuff). Performance was really poor. Ubuntu has always been a bit
graphics heavy and the acceleration isn't so good in VirtualBox it seems.

So I'm going to do what I've done many times before and install a
non-graphical Debian. I can run Emacs through there for code editing and
Synaptic for package management. I can flick between virtual terminals with
Ctrl-Alt-Fn (IIRC) and configure it to run a decently high resolution using
GRUB.

It sounds like an interesting experiment. How productive is it possible to
be using the terminal? In the modern world of HTML emails and
web-everything, it seems impossible to be productive (I'm not talking
sysadmin activity here). Email? Word processing using Latex? Spreadsheets
are fundamentally text based anyway so should be okay. Presentations would
be an obvious no-go I expect. What compromises need to be allowed? Full
screen image/PDF viewing perhaps.

It might be an interesting experiment to undertake. Especially for someone
who can code up missing pieces as needed. Especially for an old-school guy
who considered the first GUIs to be a nice fad.

"Someone" should take this on as an experiment and do a talk on it. I'm
thinking a three month experiment.

Daryl.
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