Benchmarks with TextMate's manual

[Michel Fortin]

The following benchmarks have been obtained using the TextMate manual  
as the input source:

  <http://macromates.com/textmate/manual/source.tbz>

Using PHP Markdown, parsing the 24 files separately (with the  
reference file appended to each of them), I get this (on an iBook G4  
1.2 Ghz):

                        Total   Avg.   Min.    Q1.   Med.    Q3.   Max.
     Parse Time (ms):    2616    109     13     64     89    125    433
     Diff. Min. (ms):    2292     95      0     51     75    112    419

Doing the same with Markdown.pl 1.0.2b8:

                        Total   Avg.   Min.    Q1.   Med.    Q3.   Max.
     Parse Time (ms):   11912    496    206    241    273    387   2064
     Diff. Min. (ms):    6966    290      0     35     67    181   1858

Of interest is the same thing with Markdown.pl 1.0.1:

                        Total   Avg.   Min.    Q1.   Med.    Q3.   Max.
     Parse Time (ms):    5883    245    148    168    194    220    957
     Diff. Min. (ms):    2310     96      0     19     46     71    808

The older version takes half the time. I think we're seeing here the  
drop in performance from Markdown.pl 1.0.2's new HTML block parser.  
Note that the way Markdown.pl is built, the HTML block parser is  
called for each Markdown-generated code, which means that you don't  
need to have HTML blocks in the source to experience a noticeable  
drop of performance when the HTML block parser gets slower. PHP  
Markdown used to work the same, but this changed at version 1.0.1d.

Now, the interesting part of the test: combining all the documents  
together and parsing them in one shot (352 Ko). With PHP Markdown it  
takes 29 seconds; with Markdown.pl 1.0.1 it takes 71 seconds. Beside  
the obvious speed difference between PHP Markdown and Markdown.pl  
(probably due to what I mentioned above), this test shows that  
neither PHP Markdown or Markdown.pl scale well for big documents.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/