Temptation of PyPy

Published September 13, 2013 · 1 Minute Read · ∞ Permalink

So last week I attended Strangeloop (which was excellent, by the way, and you should go if you ever have the slightest chance.) I had a couple conversations with people about performance and JIT compilers and stuff like that, and right now I’m really tempted to try out Pypy. The target project which I’m thinking about has the following properties:

• Mostly Python (i.e. few C extensions)
• Needs to be fast. (last week NewRelic measured it at 11.9ms response time)
• Calls the same methods over and over with the same types.

BUT, it also has this going on:

• The DB persistence is pymongo/hiredis (the only two C extensions here)
• Those few methods are called with complex types (specifically, Django’s request objects.) I’ve heard this can be a problem for JIT compilers, and if it is I don’t know that we’ll fully realize the speed gains.

So I’m torn, and that’s why I’m putting it up here: can anyone with experience running Pypy in production shed some light on these concerns, or am I going to have to just try it and measure performance?