While evaluating guile as a possibility to replace some python code, assuming I'm not just doing something wrong, I noticed that open-pipe appears to transfer data *much* more slowly than python when OPEN_BOTH is specified as opposed to OPEN_READ:
discarding dev-zero as file: 12500.00 mb/s discarding dev-zero via OPEN_READ: 4132.23 mb/s discarding dev-zero via OPEN_WRITE: 1.42 mb/s For something similar to the original python code and roughly similar to open-pipe OPEN_BOTH (see code below) I see: mb/s: 1713.26754296 In the end, what I'd need is an OPEN_BOTH (or equivalent) that could support block-reads and ideally read-delimited operations on the subproces output pipe at speeds much closer to python's. Here's the trivial guile test program: #!/usr/bin/env guile -s !# (use-modules ((ice-9 binary-ports) :select (get-bytevector-n! put-bytevector)) ((ice-9 format) :select (format)) ((ice-9 popen) :select (open-pipe open-pipe*)) ((rnrs bytevectors) :select (bytevector-length make-bytevector))) (define (cat-bytes src dest len) ;; Discard bytes if dest is #f (let* ((buf (make-bytevector 65536)) (buf-len (bytevector-length buf))) (let loop ((remaining len)) (unless (zero? remaining) (let ((n-or-eof (get-bytevector-n! src buf 0 (min remaining buf-len)))) (unless (eof-object? n-or-eof) (when dest (put-bytevector dest buf 0 n-or-eof)) (loop (- remaining n-or-eof)))))))) (define *discard* #f) (define *dev-zero* (with-fluids ((%default-port-encoding #f)) (open-input-file "/dev/zero"))) (define (cat-zero mode) (with-fluids ((%default-port-encoding #f)) (open-pipe* mode "cat" "/dev/zero"))) (define (time-cat-mb mb src dest) (let ((start (tms:clock (times)))) (cat-bytes src dest (* mb 1024 1024)) (when dest (force-output dest)) (let ((end (tms:clock (times)))) (format (current-error-port) "~,2f mb/s\n" (/ mb (/ (- (tms:clock (times)) start) internal-time-units-per-second)))))) (display "discarding dev-zero as file: " (current-error-port)) (time-cat-mb 10000 *dev-zero* *discard*) (display "discarding dev-zero via OPEN_READ: " (current-error-port)) (time-cat-mb 5000 (cat-zero OPEN_READ) *discard*) (display "discarding dev-zero via OPEN_WRITE: " (current-error-port)) (time-cat-mb 10 (cat-zero OPEN_BOTH) *discard*) And here's the python code: #!/usr/bin/env python import os, subprocess proc = subprocess.Popen(['cat', '/dev/zero'], stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, close_fds = True, bufsize = 4096) n_kb = 1000000 start = os.times()[4] written = 0 for i in range(n_kb): assert(len(proc.stdout.read(1024)) == 1024) written += 1024 end = os.times()[4] proc.terminate() proc.wait() print "mb/s:", (n_kb / 1024.0) / (end - start) Thanks -- Rob Browning rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org GPG as of 2011-07-10 E6A9 DA3C C9FD 1FF8 C676 D2C4 C0F0 39E9 ED1B 597A GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4