Trying to come to terms with some benchmarks (before and after --optimize)

benchmark_questions

# I'm trying to get a handle on benchmarks... NQR is getting killed by R.
# And though I can "compile" my NQR scripts, the benchmark results aren't
# changing.  So I tried the following in pure PIR, where the speed is
# comparable to R (though the PIR doesn't have anywhere near the overhead
# of a full interpreted language).

# 1             0.017    # First examples, just
# 10000         0.018    #    time parrot test.pir (done many times, averaging)
# 1000000       0.120
# 10000000      0.986
# 10000000*     0.987    # No difference after compilation.  From:
                         #   parrot -o test.pbc test.pir
                         #   time parrot test.pbc (done many times, averaging)

#########################################################################
######## Following whiteknight++'s recommendation, I rebuilt Parrot with:
# perl Configure.pl --optimize
#
# and then repeated the experiment, above.  RESULT: bug improvement (say 5x speedup),
# though compiling to bytecode still does nothing for me.

# RESULTS after rebuilding parrot with --optimize
# 1             0.014
# 10000         0.015
# 1000000       0.036
# 10000000      0.190
# 10000000*     0.191    # No speedup again of compiling

# Adding the --debugging=0 option didn't make a difference in this simple example.



##################################
# test.pir, below


.sub main
  $I0 = 10000000
 loop_top:
   if $I0 < 0 goto loop_end
   $I0 = $I0 - 1
   goto loop_top
 loop_end:
.end