Performance difference between two code

New to Julia
1

Hello,

I have two codes that are doing the exact same thing. I put them below. In the latter one, we use a multi-dimensional array instead of x. The former one is substantially faster than the other, and uses smaller number of allocations. What is the reason of it?

Thanks in advance.

—

x = [0.76,-1.13,1.33];
@time for i=1:450000
       dot(x,[1.,2.,3.])
      end

0.034094 seconds (900.00 k allocations: 96.130 MB, 11.11% gc time)

—

X = zeros(3,3,3,100);
X[:,1,1,1] = x;
@time for i=1:450000
       dot(X[:,1,1,1],[1.,2.,3.])
       end

0.226584 seconds (2.70 M allocations: 130.463 MB, 3.27% gc time)

2

This might be because indexing allocates memory, but it’s hard to tell for sure since you seem to be benchmarking in the global scope which causes problems.

3

To add to what John said, I recommend checking out the BenchmarkTools.jl package for a more comprehensive (and easy to use!) approach to benchmarking.

4 
using BenchmarkTools

foo(x,y) = dot(x[:,1,1,1], y)
bar(x,y) = @inbounds dot(x[:,1,1,1], y)
baz(x,y) = dot(x, y)

x = [0.76,-1.13,1.33];
X = zeros(3,3,3,100);
X[:,1,1,1] = x;
y = [1.,2,3]

@benchmark foo($X,$y)
@benchmark bar($X,$y)
@benchmark baz($x,$y)

julia> @benchmark foo($X,$y)
BenchmarkTools.Trial: 
  memory estimate:  128.00 bytes
  allocs estimate:  2
  --------------
  minimum time:     52.000 ns (0.00% GC)
  median time:      58.526 ns (0.00% GC)
  mean time:        64.345 ns (8.17% GC)
  maximum time:     1.080 μs (93.56% GC)
  --------------
  samples:          10000
  evals/sample:     984
  time tolerance:   5.00%
  memory tolerance: 1.00%

julia> @benchmark bar($X,$y)
BenchmarkTools.Trial: 
  memory estimate:  128.00 bytes
  allocs estimate:  2
  --------------
  minimum time:     51.291 ns (0.00% GC)
  median time:      55.050 ns (0.00% GC)
  mean time:        61.033 ns (9.23% GC)
  maximum time:     1.188 μs (92.17% GC)
  --------------
  samples:          10000
  evals/sample:     984
  time tolerance:   5.00%
  memory tolerance: 1.00%

julia> @benchmark baz($x,$y)
BenchmarkTools.Trial: 
  memory estimate:  0.00 bytes
  allocs estimate:  0
  --------------
  minimum time:     14.059 ns (0.00% GC)
  median time:      15.109 ns (0.00% GC)
  mean time:        15.060 ns (0.00% GC)
  maximum time:     29.657 ns (0.00% GC)
  --------------
  samples:          10000
  evals/sample:     998
  time tolerance:   5.00%
  memory tolerance: 1.00%
2 Likes