[flac-dev] Performance checks

[Janne Hyvärinen]

On 1.6.2013 14:24, Janne Hyvärinen wrote:
> On 31.5.2013 13:04, Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
>> On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 04:08:57PM +0200, Martijn van Beurden wrote:
>>> I was surprised to see that the Windows compile on wine actually
>>> outperformed the native Linux one. Probably GCC 4.6 optimized a little
>>> better or something very weird is going on in wine, I don't know. The
>>> assembly optimizations work very well on encoding, but actually slow
>>> things down when decoding. The difference is not very large however.
>> In a quick test with a pre 4.8 gcc on a Core 2 CPU I see a small
>> improvement in decoding speed with assembly optimizations turned on,
>> but I think the difference used to be larger. Perhaps the compilers
>> got better or MMX is slower relative to normal code on current CPUs.
>>
>> Disabling the FLAC__bitreader_read_rice_signed_block_asm_ia32_bswap
>> function seems to help a bit. (there is an #if disabling the function
>> with comment "OPT: not clearly faster, needs more testing" in the
>> src/libFLAC/stream_decoder.c file)
>>
>> Here is the relative decoding speed with -5 and -8:
>> 			-5		-8
>> no asm			99.0%		97.0%
>> asm			100.0%		100.0%
>> asm (no ia32_bswap)	102.7%		102.7%
>>
>> I think we should drop that assembly function as the C
>> version seems to be faster now.
>>
>> Can anyone confirm this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
> I can confirm. I see 10% speed improvement with that change on Core i7.
> Decoding a 1h18min38.133s long test FLAC -8 encoded file takes with
> normal asm optimizations 7.656s (speed: 616,266x realtime) and with that
> tiny change 6.937s (speed: 680,140x realtime).
>
>

I noticed a side effect for this change. Encoding got a bit slower at 
least when md5 checksumming is enabled.