GMime gets a Speed Boost

With all of the performance improvements I've been putting into MimeKit recently, it was about time to port some of these optimizations back to GMime.

In addition to other fixes that were in the queue, GMime 2.6.20 includes the "SIMD" optimization hack that I blogged about doing for MimeKit and I wanted to share the results. Below is a comparison of GMime 2.6.19 and 2.6.20 parsing the same 2GB mbox file on my 2011 Core-i5 iMac with the "persistent stream" option enabled on the GMimeParser:

[fejj@localhost gmime-2.6.19]$ ./gmime-mbox-parser really-big.mbox
Parsed 29792 messages in 5.15 seconds.

[fejj@localhost gmime-2.6.20]$ ./gmime-mbox-parser really-big.mbox
Parsed 29792 messages in 4.70 seconds.

That's a pretty respectable improvement. Interestingly, though, it's still not as fast as MimeKit utilizing Mono's LLVM backend:

[fejj@localhost MimeKit]$ mono --llvm ./mbox-parser.exe really-big.mbox
Parsed 29792 messages in 4.52 seconds.

Of course, to be fair, without the --llvm option, MimeKit doesn't fare quite so well:

[fejj@localhost MimeKit]$ mono ./mbox-parser.exe really-big.mbox
Parsed 29792 messages in 5.54 seconds.

I'm not sure what kind of optimizations LLVM utilizes when used from Mono vs clang (used to compile GMime via homebrew, which I suspect uses -O2), but nevertheless, it's still very impressive.

After talking with Rodrigo Kumpera from the Mono runtime team, it sounds like the --llvm option is essentially the -O2 optimizations minus a few of the options that cause problems with the Mono runtime, so effectively somewhere between -O1 and -O2.

I'd love to find out why MimeKit with the LLVM optimizer is faster than GMime compiled with clang (which also makes use of LLVM) with the same optimizations, but I think it'll be pretty hard to narrow down exactly because MimeKit isn't really a straight port of GMime (they are similar, but a lot of MimeKit is all-new in design and implementation).