Benchmarking Mono-Compiled LSL

After Robby's response to my post about listener lag, I had the idea to see just what sort of speed improvements Mono will bring. I made a fairly simple benchmarking script that does the following tasks:

• Integer addition (7000 times)


• Float addition (7000 times)


• Integer multiplication (7000 times)


• Float multiplication (7000 times)


• Integer division (7000 times)


• Float division (7000 times)


• Grow a list by repeatedly inserting [0] (300 times)


• Randomize a list and sort it (100 times, list size 300)


• Break a string into a list of words and check whether each word is equal to "hello" or "world" (200 times)

The tasks are pretty basic. That last one is generally what a listener would do. I chose the number of times each would be repeated so that every task would take about 10 seconds.

In doing this, I discovered that the performance of standard LSL scripts is extremely variable. I configured the numbers so that each task would take 10 about seconds; at this point I was at my house on the normal grid. But when I logged into the beta grid and ran the script in a Mono sim (without compiling to Mono), the arithmetic tasks each took about 3 seconds. Thinking maybe for some reason normal LSL scripts also ran faster on Mono sims, I tried running it at various other sims on the Beta grid. In some it ran at 10 seconds, others 3 seconds, others 17 seconds. I couldn't really see a pattern (Havok1 vs. Havok4, Mono vs. non-Mono), although it was always 3 seconds on the Mono sims, but I did get 3 seconds once on a non-Mono Havok4 sim. The numbers fluctuated between sims, but if I ran it multiple times on the same sim, I would get about the same results. Are all the sims on the beta grid Tier 5? It probably just comes down to how much other stuff is going on in the sim. But the last 3 tasks were always about the same time...very strange.

Anyway, here are the results. For the non-Mono numbers, I chose the ones closest to 10 seconds.

Task	Non-Mono	Mono	% Increase	Times faster
Adding integers	12.356465	0.133350	9166%	92.662
Adding floats	12.643500	0.066761	18838%	189.385
Multiplying integers	12.310993	0.066601	18385%	184.847
Multiplying floats	12.556296	0.044415	28170%	282.704
Dividing integers	12.355354	0.066727	18416%	185.163
Dividing floats	12.555955	0.044925	27848%	279.487
List insertion	10.018719	0.000000	N/A	N/A
List randomize/sort	8.905011	0.000000	N/A	N/A
String tokenize	9.640886	0.138814	6845%	69.452
Total	103.343179	0.561593	18302%	184.018

So the claims that Mono is over 1000 times faster don't seem to hold up. But still...this is just amazing. I laughed out loud when the benchmark finished in under a second when I had just waited over a minute and a half for the previous one to finish. I especially like how the list operations were too fast to measure. I am going to make some changes tomorrow so that I can actually get some numbers that I can analyze. I also want to add some more tests that better simulate "real-world usage". If you have any ideas, please tell me.