On March 13 I raised a concern about performance, Subject "musl 14x slower? ". It now looks like most of that issue had to do with my application code. But here's a more focused look at how musl compares to native build. Granted this is crude, limited, but it looks like musl is 20% slower.
I built Python both native and with musl. It's not apples to apples, I actually used a newer version of gcc to build musl 1.1.8 and musl Python. This may and may not be an advantage fro the musl version. I also used -O3 when building musl and musl Python. I assume this should help the musl version. The musl version also uses a newer version of Python. That may or may not be helpful. I can redo with a more consistent builds if this is worthwhile. Maybe you can suggest a straight C benchmark instead.
I picked this at random. It is not all encompassing.
I've also never used "perf" before. Feel free to advise if this needs improvement.
musl version:
$ python
Python 2.7.9 (default, Apr 2 2015, 15:16:16)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
$ perf stat python spitfire_bigtable.py
StringIO 507.98 ms
cStringIO 189.18 ms
list concat 61.59 ms
Performance counter stats for '/home/mudd/multicorn_ctree/spitfire_bigtable.py':
810.537826 task-clock (msec) # 0.971 CPUs utilized
297 context-switches # 0.366 K/sec
11 cpu-migrations # 0.014 K/sec
5,977 page-faults # 0.007 M/sec
2,151,830,012 cycles # 2.655 GHz [50.64%]
<not supported> stalled-cycles-frontend
<not supported> stalled-cycles-backend
3,106,074,350 instructions # 1.44 insns per cycle [74.86%]
677,389,217 branches # 835.728 M/sec [74.56%]
13,710,101 branch-misses # 2.02% of all branches [75.09%]
0.834844640 seconds time elapsed
$
native:
$ python
Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug 19 2013, 15:23:53)
[GCC 4.7.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
$ perf stat ~/multicorn_ctree/spitfire_bigtable.py
StringIO 402.63 ms
cStringIO 132.62 ms
list concat 46.89 ms
Performance counter stats for '/home/mudd/multicorn_ctree/spitfire_bigtable.py':
626.547364 task-clock (msec) # 0.982 CPUs utilized
169 context-switches # 0.270 K/sec
19 cpu-migrations # 0.030 K/sec
5,773 page-faults # 0.009 M/sec
1,663,247,805 cycles # 2.655 GHz [49.94%]
<not supported> stalled-cycles-frontend
<not supported> stalled-cycles-backend
2,573,617,826 instructions # 1.55 insns per cycle [75.03%]
554,357,437 branches # 884.781 M/sec [75.49%]
10,851,258 branch-misses # 1.96% of all branches [74.83%]
0.638252827 seconds time elapsed
$