Try your Python application with PyPy, the new hot Python JIT compiler

• Your program will run faster…
• … faster…
• and ..faster!

Here are quick instructions for using PyPy on OSX. You should be able to apply these instructions to other UNIX systems as well.

Install PyPy by getting binary tarball.

wget http://pypy.org/download/pypy-1.4.1-osx64.tar.bz2
tar -xjf pypy-1.4.1-osx64.tar.bz

Install Distribute / easy_install command (setuptools fork) in order to install third party libraries.

cd pypy-1.4.1-osx64
wget http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
bin/pypy distribute_setup.py

Install libraries – easy_install seems to run just fine on PyPy as long as you don’t try to install Python native extensions

bin/easy_install plac # command line parser
bin/easy_install iso8601 # date format parser

Then run your application

~/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/bin/pypy exceptionanalysis.py     -s=2010-01-01T00:00:00 /Users/moo/xxx/log/client1.log

In my case the application was a simple log analyzer based on Python generators (code will be posted later). It reads a text file and tries to interpret it. The script utilizes only one CPU core and thus is very CPU bound. The speed comparison results are

• With Python 2.4: Completed in 111.08 seconds
• With PyPy: Completed in 30.39 seconds

That’s almost 4x speed-up!

Things did not work with PyPy

• import multiprocessing – was not hard dependency, needed to comment out in plac_ext

Here is the traceback if anyone can help:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "app_main.py", line 53, in run_toplevel
 File "exceptionanalysis.py", line 20, in <module>
 import plac
 File "/Users/moo/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/site-packages/plac-0.8.0-py2.5.egg/plac.py", line 35, in <module>
 from plac_ext import Interpreter, import_main, ReadlineInput, stdout, runp, Monitor
 File "/Users/moo/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/site-packages/plac-0.8.0-py2.5.egg/plac_ext.py", line 7, in <module>
 import itertools, traceback, multiprocessing, signal, threading
 File "/Users/moo/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/site-packages/multiprocessing-2.6.2.1-py2.5-macosx-10.6-i386.egg/multiprocessing/__init__.py", line 87, in <module>
 import _multiprocessing
 File "/Users/moo/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/site-packages/multiprocessing-2.6.2.1-py2.5-macosx-10.6-i386.egg/multiprocessing/_multiprocessing.py", line 7, in <module>
 __bootstrap__()
 File "/Users/moo/code/pypy-1.4.1-osx64/site-packages/multiprocessing-2.6.2.1-py2.5-macosx-10.6-i386.egg/multiprocessing/_multiprocessing.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
 imp.load_dynamic(__name__,__file__)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'load_dynamic'

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