slot widgets for performance and memory improvment

peterbrittain / asciimatics

A cross platform package to do curses-like operations, plus higher level APIs and widgets to create text UIs and ASCII art animations

Apache License 2.0

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slot widgets for performance and memory improvment #213

Closed jabdoa2 closed 5 years ago

jabdoa2 commented 5 years ago

Issues fixed by this PR

None

What does this implement/fix?

Improve performance of widget creation in Python 3 by slotting widgets.

coveralls commented 5 years ago

Coverage increased (+0.01%) to 96.301% when pulling 46f896e69ffb364f3b633c97a37b2b669e3c8bdc on jabdoa2:slot_widgets into 3c3267a76cd57bbe8df711c86743c96f819ac47a on peterbrittain:master.

peterbrittain commented 5 years ago

Interesting... As I understood it, use of slots gives you a marginal performance and occupancy benefit. I hadn't done anything with it up to now as I didn't think it warranted the extra effort of synchronizing the list with the code to initialize it. What sort of gains did you get in making this change?

jabdoa2 commented 5 years ago

We get 3-4% of worst case CPU improvements from this. This mostly reduces the memory footprint of objects because they won't use a dict but a fixed position for the attributes. As a result access times are shorter. However, I guess in this case reduced memory footprint has the largest effect (because we create a lot of Labels). PYPY does this automatically but Python does not.