Re: [eigen] new eigen2 release (2.0.12) runs slower than 2.0.0 ?

[Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Leon,

So far, we haven't been doing any serious testing for performance
regressions. It's just that the commits that we allow into the 2.0
branch are, in principle, very safe.

The online benchmarks refer to the development branch (though at that
time it wasn't much different from 2.0.0).

What you report sounds very interesting but we indeed need more
details in order to do anything about it. Ideally, if you could
produce a self-contained, compilable benchmark...

Here are some ideas.

First let's check for potentially stupid compiler optimizations:
 - what happens if you remove -ffast-math?
 - what happens if you replace -O3 by -O2 ?

Is it 32bit or 64bit code?

If you disable vectorization (EIGEN_DONT_VECTORIZE) on both sides, how
does performance compare?

Benoit


2010/3/1 leon zadorin <leonleon77@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi all -- just a generic question w.r.t. benchmarking being done to
> compare older vs newer eigen2 releases to see if, inadvertently, there
> are performance-related regressions...
>
> I have noticed that v 2.0.12 appears to have slowed down in comparison
> to 2.0.0_1 ...
>
> Currently, it's too time-consuming for me to unwind the code for a
> particular bottleneck -- I have simply noticed that a complex function
> (log-likelihood calculations made up from large dynamic matricies of
> mainly column-major layout with some exp, cwise, select, etc. calls)
> are taking ~3.4 seconds to calculate with 2.0.12 whilst taking ~3.1
> seconds with the 2.0.0 (exactly same app's code and compilation
> options (e.g. -DNDEBUG -O3 -ffast-math -march=native on E6550 core2
> duo cpu -- implying SSE3 et al, eigen_vectorization macros etc etc
> etc)... running with gcc 4.4 (threading model single) on FreeBSD with
> drawf eh.
>
> My current question would be if the new versions/releases of Eigen do
> undergo the comparative (to earlier versions) performance-related
> benchmarks tests to find any performance regressions et al?
>
> The benchmarks page
> http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Benchmark
> appears to list march, 2009 (oldish) as the date for benchmarks?
>
> ... and it only compares eigen2 vs other libs... are there any
> already-done marks w.r.t. eigen vs eigen of different versions out
> there?
>
> Kind regards
> Leon.
>
>
>