Take full advantage of processor speed on Windows machine

Question

New member here but long time Perl programmer.

I have a process that I run on a Windows machine that iterates through combinations of records from arrays/lists to identify a maximum combination, following a set of criteria.

On an old Intel i3 machine, an example would take about 45 mins to run. I purchased a new AMD Ryzen 7 machine that on benchmarks is about 7 or 8 times faster than the old machine. But the execution time was only reduced from 45 to 22 minutes.

This new machine has crazy processor capabilities, but it does not appear that Perl takes advantage of these.

Are there Perl settings or ways of coding to take advantage of all of the processor speed that I have on my new machine? Threads, etc?

thanks

Answer 1

Perl by default will only use a single thread and thus only a single CPU core. This means it will only use a small part of what current multi-core systems offer. It has the ability to make use of multiple threads though and thus multiple CPU core. But this needs to be explicitly done, i.e. the implementation needs to be adapted to make use of parallel execution. This can involve major changes to the algorithm used to solve your problem. And not all problems can be easily parallelized.

Apart from the Perl is not the preferred languages if performance is the goal. There is lots of overhead due to being a dynamically typed language and no explicitly control over memory allocation. Languages like C, C++ or Rust which are closer to the hardware start with significantly less overhead and then allow even more low-level control to further reuse overhead. But they don't magically parallelize either.