I grabbed perlbench from CPAN and did some more benchmarks. These confirmed what we already suspected, i.e. there are no significant performance differences in Perl itself between 5.6.1, 5.8.0, and 5.8.1, but the stock Perl on Red Hat 9 (which is compiled with threads) is significantly slower than a default compile of any recent Perl on the same system.
All of the Perls that I compiled were done with default options. The output of perlbench is attached. - Perrin
A) perl-5.006001 path = /usr/local/perl56/bin/perl cc = cc optimize = -O2 ccflags = -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 usemymalloc = n B) perl-5.008 path = /usr/local/perl580/bin/perl cc = cc optimize = -O3 ccflags = -fno-strict-aliasing -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/include/gdbm usemymalloc = n C) perl-5.008001 path = /usr/local/perl581/bin/perl cc = cc optimize = -O3 ccflags = -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/include/gdbm usemymalloc = n D) perl-5.008 path = /usr/bin/perl cc = gcc optimize = -O2 -g -pipe -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 ccflags = -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS -DDEBUGGING -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/include/gdbm usemymalloc = n A B C D ---- ---- ---- ---- arith/mixed 100 95 93 82 arith/trig 100 92 93 82 array/copy 100 108 103 81 array/foreach 100 110 118 83 array/index 100 112 116 95 array/pop 100 105 99 79 array/shift 100 103 99 78 array/sort-num 100 92 94 72 array/sort 100 99 99 89 call/0arg 100 100 100 90 call/1arg 100 97 103 88 call/2arg 100 100 103 87 call/9arg 100 111 110 90 call/empty 100 98 99 74 call/fib 100 109 106 95 call/method 100 106 107 86 call/wantarray 100 104 104 78 hash/copy 100 114 117 89 hash/each 100 95 95 76 hash/foreach-sort 100 100 100 83 hash/foreach 100 109 113 95 hash/get 100 104 106 70 hash/set 100 83 81 75 loop/for-c 100 107 104 95 loop/for-range-const 100 97 110 81 loop/for-range 100 102 114 90 loop/getline 100 88 88 66 loop/while-my 100 97 104 84 loop/while 100 88 103 84 re/const 100 94 87 59 re/w 100 93 90 72 startup/fewmod 100 66 61 45 startup/lotsofsub 100 93 92 65 startup/noprog 100 84 80 52 string/base64 100 106 105 91 string/htmlparser 100 99 92 77 string/index-const 100 92 95 50 string/index-var 100 95 98 74 string/ipol 100 97 97 89 string/tr 100 101 93 100 AVERAGE 100 99 99 80
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