# Zygote very slow relative to ForwardDiff?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/zygote-very-slow-relative-to-forwarddiff/82837>\
**Category:** Performance\
**Created:** [June 15, 2022, 8:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/zygote-very-slow-relative-to-forwarddiff/82837 "2022-06-15T20:31:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![robsmith11](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/robsmith11/32/29641_2.png) [@robsmith11](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/robsmith11)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 8:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/zygote-very-slow-relative-to-forwarddiff/82837/1 "2022-06-15T20:31:22Z")

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I’m trying to speed up fitting a model with DynamicHMC.jl, so I was experimenting with different autodiff packages. I’ve seen Zygote mentioned quite a bit as a promising autodiff package, but the performance seems to be several orders of magnitude slower. Am I not using it correctly? Is there any way to avoid all those allocations?

Simple example:

```julia
julia> const xs = randn(10^5);

julia> function f(θ)
        sum(logpdf.(Normal(θ[1], θ[2]), xs))
       end
f (generic function with 2 methods)

julia> @time ForwardDiff.gradient(f, [0.0, 1.0]);
  0.356206 seconds (381.72 k allocations: 27.519 MiB, 99.14% compilation time)

julia> @time ForwardDiff.gradient(f, [0.0, 1.0]);
  0.003052 seconds (7 allocations: 2.289 MiB)

julia> @time Zygote.gradient(f, [0.0, 1.0]);
  1.380850 seconds (5.43 M allocations: 176.099 MiB, 12.80% gc time, 8.46% compilation time)

julia> @time Zygote.gradient(f, [0.0, 1.0]);
  1.280075 seconds (5.40 M allocations: 174.718 MiB, 14.57% gc time)

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2022, 8:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/zygote-very-slow-relative-to-forwarddiff/82837/2 "2022-06-15T20:56:59Z")

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> [@robsmith11](#):
>
> Am I not using it correctly?

Backwards-mode autodiff is designed for the case of a huge number of parameters (hundreds, thousands, or more); with just 2 parameters you are better off with forwards-mode autodiff (like ForwardDiff).