1 About Benchmarking

• The benchmark script runs all the tests once to warm things up, then runs them three times and takes the mean.  The PixyMark score is simply the inverse of the geometric mean of the scores.  This matters for PyPy, because it takes some time for the JIT compiler to engage.
  
  Tests were run on a virtual machine on what I believe to be a Xeon E3 1230, though it might be a 1225 v2 or v3.
  
  
• The Python Markdown library is very slow. The best alternative appears to be Hoep, which is a wrapper for the Hoedown library, which is a fork of the Sundown library, which is a fork of the unfortunately named Upskirt library.   (The author of which is not a native English speaker, and probably had not previously run into the SJW crowd.)
  
  Hoep is slower for some reason in PyPy than CPython, but still plenty fast.
  
  
• cPickle is an order of magnitude slower than a good JSON or MsgPack codec.
  
  
• The built-in JSON module in CPython is the slowest Python JSON codec. The built-in JSON module in PyPy appears to be the fastest.  For CPython I used uJSON, which seems to be the best option if you're not using PyPy.
  
  
• CPython is very good at appending to strings. PyPy, IronPython (Python for .Net) and Jython (Python for Java) are uniformly terrible at this. This is due to a clever memory allocation optimisation that is tied closely to CPython's garbage collection mechanism, and isn't available in the other implementations.
  
  I removed the test from my benchmark because for large strings it's so slow that it overwhelms everything else.  Instead, append to a list and join it when you're done, or something along those lines.
  
  
• I generally see about a 6x speedup from PyPy.  In these benchmarks I've been focusing on getting the best possible speed for various functions, using C libraries wherever possible.  A C library called from Python runs at exactly the same speed as a C library called from PyPy, so this has inherently reduced the relative benefits of PyPy.  PyPy is still about 3x faster, though; in other words, migrating to PyPy effectively turns a five-year-old mid-range CPU into 8GHz next-gen unobtainium.  
  
  
• If you are very careful about selecting your libraries.  There's an alternate Snappy compression library available.  It's about the same speed under CPython, but 30x slower under PyPy due to inefficiencies in PyPy's CTypes binding.
  
  
• uWSGI is pretty neat.  The cache tests are run using uWSGI's cache2 module; it's the fastest caching mechanism I've seen for Python so far.  Faster than the native caching decorators I've tested - and it's shared across multiple processes.  (It can also be shared across multiple servers, but that is certain to be slower, unless you have some seriously fancy networking hardware.)
  
  One note, though: The uWSGI cache2 Python API is not binary-safe.  You need to JSON-encode or Base64 or something along those lines.
  
  
• The Bleach package - a handy HTML sanitiser - is so slow that it's useless for web output - you have to sanitise on input, which means that you either lose the original text or have to store both.  Unless, that is, you have a caching mechanism with a sub-microsecond latency.
  
  
• The Bunch package on the other hand - which lets you use object notation on Python dictionaries, so you can say customer.address rather than customer['address'] - is really fast.  I've been using it a lot recently and knew it was fast, but 1.6us to wrap a 30-element dictionary under PyPy is a pretty solid result.
  
  
• As an aside, if you can retrieve, uncompress, unpack, and wrap a record with 30 fields in 8us, it's worth thinking about caching database records.  Except then you have to worry about cache invalidation.  Except - if you're using MongoDB, you can tail the oplog to automatically invalidate cached records.  And if you're using uWSGI, you can trivially fork that off as a worker process.
  
  Which means that if you have, say, a blogging platform with a template engine that frequently needs to look up related records (like the author or category for a post) this becomes easy, fast, and almost perfectly consistent.  

1

I listened to part of that, and the soloist (that guy in the middle) has an astounding voice. When he's singing in his falsetto he sounds like a woman, and for a while I wondered if he was lipsynching.

The guy on the lower right corner looks like he was built out of spare parts stolen from a cemetery. He just needs a couple of bolts sticking out of his neck to be complete.

I looked at their Wikipedia site and it said that their ambition is to be the latest successful a capella group. Which is a noble ambition, but I had to think about it for a moment.

Manhattan Transfer is gone, and Rockapella was never really much of a success, though they're still performing. So I guess the "successful a capella group" slot really is empty right now.

2 They should appear in an episode of Doctor Who as a 51st century pop group.  Probably would have worked better in Chris Ecclestone's time, but they weren't around then.

They look pretty different without the makeup.

3 gtarkmbqrverrlqmkbnfk srnnmif nzegjtj ybhduxt

4 yenwycvndqetjlwccjyxt ffxtjdk nqemkva irmzekd

5 wtiayodesibsbtqwscaot kcesckw nxuimyj zpxgnbk

1 Actually, I did just learn something: how "ankylosaurus" is pronounced. I've been saying it wrong my whole life.

2 I... I love this.  I love this more than I could have thought ever possible.

3 Wikipedia lists two different pronunciations.  I'd never heard this one before either.

1 You seem to have lost a month's worth of posts. (Including pictures of pretty girls.)

2 Caching glitch - back to normal now.

1 Rain is good! You guys need rain!

2 But it's nicer if it's spread out over more time, I must admit.

3 Well, there's rain and then there's a foot of rainfall in 24 hours accompanied by 80mph winds.  That's not so good.

Right now it's stopped here, after 48 hours of constant heavy rain and high winds.  It's almost eerie how quiet it is.  From the weather radar it looks like I'm in a localised pocket of calm and the storm will be back by morning.
 
Channel Nine have some good photos and videos of the damage.

4 Found a report on flooding on the Parramatta River from earlier this year, which shows that I'm just not all that attentive.

But the picture there shows the same ferry terminal as the video above, except that back in January water was flowing from somewhere else across the terminal and draining into the river, where now the river itself has risen to flood the terminal and everything around it.

5

Does weather at your latitude blow west or east?

6 Weather moves from west to east over most of Australia, but in the opposite direction in the far north.  The result is that tropical storms will occasionally get stuck and wander south, sometimes as far as Sydney.

Very similar to the continental US and hurricanes tracking up your east coast, just with north and south reversed.

1 now i'm seasick.

2 I will admit to only watching a minute or two but that seems more like Cities: Raillercoaster, no?

3 Light rail or Death Coaster From Hell?