Speed v Version

[Dave Lambley]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, Dirk Koopman wrote:

> I contemplating providing "encouragement" to a customer to upgrade from 5.8.7 
> to something more modern. One of the overriding issues is "speed". The 
> customer is fixated with "speed".
>
> Unfortunately one of the major things the customer's clients do is 
> "replicate" their ISAM data into databases, usually MS-SQL via DBI and 
> DBD::ODBC. The ISAM data is always on Linux (and a few Unix) boxes. The 
> replication is a batch process that must complete overnight. Currently it is 
> a fairly close run thing.
>
> I don't suppose anyone has done any speed benchmarking on the various perls 
> to date? Still less on newer DBIs etc? All the customer's modules are circa 
> 2005.

My former employer did some benchmarking of different versions of Perl, 
used inside mod_perl.  Perl 5.10.x proved faster than 5.8.x, and 64 bit 
was faster than 32.  This was for a CPU bound application though, which it 
sounds like your's is not.

Dave