[fpc-devel] I've asked this before, but perhaps I wasn't specific enough that time: what do I *personally*, specifically need to do to ensure that a native Windows 64-bit build winds up on the FPC website for the next release?

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 1/14/22 03:18, Ben Grasset via fpc-devel wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:28 AM Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-devel 
> <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>     So, instead of giving actual benchmark data on the Windows
>     performance, you speculate by claiming that having faster
>     exception handling matters, and then you immediately debunk your
>     own argument by admitting it probably doesn't matter for the
>     compilation speed.
>
>  I went ahead and tested "make cycle" for both ppcx64.exe and 
> ppc386.exe, using PowerShell's "Measure Command" for timing as it's 
> the most accurate method I'm aware of on Windows. Both results came in 
> under one minute, and the 64-bit compiler /was /faster, though not by 
> a large amount for that relatively short workload (I might test a full 
> repo build later to see what the differences are like between longer 
> compilations). This also would seem to show that what CPU you have 
> basically stops mattering after a certain point as far as FPC's 
> performance goes, as mine is MUCH slower than yours (i7-4790K clocked 
> at 4.6GHz currently).
>
> 64-bit:
>
> PS D:\fpclaz\FPCSource\compiler> Measure-Command {Start-Process make 
> -ArgumentList "cycle PP=D:\fpclaz\fpc\bin\x86_64-win64\ppcx64.exe" -Wait}
>
> Days              : 0
> Hours             : 0
> Minutes           : 0
> Seconds           : 52
> Milliseconds      : 815
> Ticks             : 528157597
> TotalDays         : 0.000611293515046296
> TotalHours        : 0.0146710443611111
> TotalMinutes      : 0.880262661666667
> TotalSeconds      : 52.8157597
> TotalMilliseconds : 52815.7597
>
> 32-bit:
>
> PS D:\fpclaz\fpcsource\compiler> Measure-Command {Start-Process make 
> -ArgumentList "cycle PP=D:\fpclaz\fpc\bin\x86_64-win64\ppc386.exe" -Wait}
>
> Days              : 0
> Hours             : 0
> Minutes           : 0
> Seconds           : 56
> Milliseconds      : 873
> Ticks             : 568733659
> TotalDays         : 0.000658256549768519
> TotalHours        : 0.0157981571944444
> TotalMinutes      : 0.947889431666667
> TotalSeconds      : 56.8733659
> TotalMilliseconds : 56873.3659

Just for the record, is this with antivirus off or on and which 
antivirus program?

Also, I know my first benchmark was make cycle comparison between ppc386 
and ppcx64 under linux (and it showcased that 32-bit compilers can be 
much faster, when CPU is the bottleneck), but then I realized it can be 
an apples to oranges comparison, because ppc386 contains a very 
different code generator, it emits 32-bit code, instead of 64-bit code. 
That's why I tried compiling lazarus for win64 using ppcx64 and 
ppcrossx64. On my computer it turned out that ppcrossx64 was slightly 
faster, when antivirus is turned off. When antivirus is on, both became 
slower, with sometimes ppcrossx64 was slightly slower, but other times 
ppcx64 was still slower. It was less predictable with more random 
variance in performance, but it felt like ppcrossx64 was slightly slower 
on average with antivirus on. Another issue is that I/O turned out to be 
a huge bottleneck, even with enormous amounts of RAM for cache. For 
example, cleaning up the git repo between runs sends the deleted files 
to the recycle bin. I then emptied the recycle bin, before running the 
next build. However, skipping this recycle bin emptying resulted in a 
performance boost that was larger than the difference between ppcrossx64 
and ppcx64. So far, my preliminary conclusions are:

1) CPU is usually not a huge bottleneck when compiling with FPC under 
Windows

2) I/O is a huge bottleneck, even with large amounts of free RAM 
available for cache

3) Windows Defender is also a huge bottleneck and it appears to hurt 
startup of 32-bit programs more (perhaps there are more win32 viruses to 
scan for in exe files?). But it still hurts both win32 and win64 
programs. Turning it off during long compilations is almost always 
beneficial.

4) The compilation speed of ppcx64 and ppcrossx64 is comparable 
regardless of whether Windows Defender is on or off.

5) When CPU is the bottleneck (antivirus turned off), the 32-bit hosted 
compiler is faster. This still needs confirmation, though, because your 
results show 32-bit being slower, but you didn't say whether antivirus 
was off.

Nikolay
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/attachments/20220114/2674895e/attachment.htm>