Python on FreeBSD is slower than on Linux

[Mark Blackman]

On 12 Nov 2015, at 19:35, Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm adding Freebsd-virtualization to this thread as both problems point to some possible issue with FreeBSD as a guest.  (although a bare metal comparison should likely be done as well).
> 
> -Alfred
> 
>> On 11/12/15 11:26 AM, Vladimir Bogrecov wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I'm developing a little project on Python 3.5. The server's operating
>> system is FreeBSD 10.2. Today I decided to do a little test "just for fun"
>> and the result has confused me. I ran the following code
>> 
>> import random
>> import time
>> 
>> 
>> def test_sort(size):
>>     sequence = [i for i in range(0, size)]
>>     random.shuffle(sequence)
>>     start = time.time()
>>     ordered_sequence = sorted(sequence)
>>     print(time.time() - start)
>> 
>> 
>> if __name__ == '__main__':
>>     test_sort(1000000)
>> 
>> on FreeBSD 10.2 x64 and on Debian 8 x64. Both computers was the smallest
>> (5$ per month) virtual machines on the Digital Ocean (
>> https://www.digitalocean.com). The average result on the FreeBSD was 1.5
>> sec, on the Debian 1.0 sec. Both machines was created specially for test
>> and had not any customization. Could you help me to understand why python
>> is so slower on FreeBSD and may be there are some steps I can perform to
>> speed up the python to work not slower than on Debian.
>> 
>> I have found in Google the similar question:
>> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-python/2012-June/004306.html so
>> it has an interest not only for me.
>> 
>> P.S. I really like FreeBSD and I would be happy to solve this issue. If you
>> will have an interest to this issue I can provide SSH access for both
>> machines :)
>> 
>> Thank You!

I have some memory that the gettimeofday is quite expensive on FreeBSD as a result of substantially more accuracy and I reckon that test script is calling it about 2 million times.

Mark