.NET vs Mono performance

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jon Harrop
  • Start date Start date
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Jon Harrop

I've just done some quick performance tests using various medium-sized
benchmarks and it appears that .NET is vastly faster than Mono. Can anyone
confirm this?

For example, my ray tracer benchmark from the shootout (in C#):

32-bit .NET: 13s
64-bit Mono: 123s

I was expecting Mono to be maybe 2x slower but 10x is very disappointing.
 
Jon Harrop said:
I've just done some quick performance tests using various medium-sized
benchmarks and it appears that .NET is vastly faster than Mono. Can anyone
confirm this?

For example, my ray tracer benchmark from the shootout (in C#):

32-bit .NET: 13s
64-bit Mono: 123s

I was expecting Mono to be maybe 2x slower but 10x is very disappointing.
Click to expand...

I think it would be worth doing performance tests on more similar
equipment - tests on different architectures aren't very easily
comparable.

Also bear in mind that your bottleneck may be something that the Mono
JIT does particularly badly - it's effectively impossible to get a
"general" benchmark, as every application will have slightly different
bottlenecks.

Having said all that, I agree it's disappointing.
 
Jon said:
I think it would be worth doing performance tests on more similar
equipment - tests on different architectures aren't very easily
comparable.
Click to expand...

These are identical machines:

2x 4400+ AMD64 (2.2GHz)
2Gb RAM
GF7900GT

The only difference is the software (64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows). If
anything I'd expect 64-bit to give the advantage to Mono.
Also bear in mind that your bottleneck may be something that the Mono
JIT does particularly badly - it's effectively impossible to get a
"general" benchmark, as every application will have slightly different
bottlenecks.
Click to expand...

Yes. Any idea what the problem might be? Perhaps Mono is swamped by 64-bit
pointers, but that would only explain another factor of 2.
 
Jon said:
The only difference is the software (64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows). If
anything I'd expect 64-bit to give the advantage to Mono.
Click to expand...

I'd actually expect the opposite, due to reduced effective cache size
because of larger pointers and less maturity in compilation experience &
effort.

-- Barry
 
Barry said:
I'd actually expect the opposite, due to reduced effective cache size
because of larger pointers and less maturity in compilation experience &
effort.
Click to expand...

I've only ever seen one benchmark get worse going from 32- to 64-bit and it
was an allocation intensive tree-based algorithm. In general, 64-bit is
much faster, particularly for FP intensive work like this ray tracer.
 
Jon said:
I've only ever seen one benchmark get worse going from 32- to 64-bit
Click to expand...

Specifically using the Mono JIT compiler? Not all compilers are created
equal by dint of targeting the same architecture, alas.
and it
was an allocation intensive tree-based algorithm. In general, 64-bit is
much faster, particularly for FP intensive work like this ray tracer.
Click to expand...

I think you need to isolate your variables and test Mono on Win32.

FP on x64 is completely different from x86 - specifically x87 isn't
there, there's no FP stack etc. FP codegen needs a rewrite for x64.
Perhaps it hasn't been paid due attention yet for Mono/x64?

-- Barry
 
Why not test windows mono against .net on same machine and OS? At least
that way, you eliminate the 32/64 issue and the OS issue and can get closer
to apples-to-apples tests on library perf.

--
William Stacey [C# MVP]


|
| I've just done some quick performance tests using various medium-sized
| benchmarks and it appears that .NET is vastly faster than Mono. Can anyone
| confirm this?
|
| For example, my ray tracer benchmark from the shootout (in C#):
|
| 32-bit .NET: 13s
| 64-bit Mono: 123s
|
| I was expecting Mono to be maybe 2x slower but 10x is very disappointing.
|
| --
| Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
| OCaml for Scientists
|
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet
 
Barry said:
Specifically using the Mono JIT compiler?
Click to expand...

No, that was OCaml (which is more pointer-intensive than most languages).
Not all compilers are created equal by dint of targeting the same
architecture, alas.
True.

I think you need to isolate your variables and test Mono on Win32.

FP on x64 is completely different from x86 - specifically x87 isn't
there, there's no FP stack etc. FP codegen needs a rewrite for x64.
Perhaps it hasn't been paid due attention yet for Mono/x64?
Click to expand...

Yes, that's a very good point. I hadn't thought of it like that. Actually, I
didn't even know you could get Mono for Windows.

However, I'm really interested in .NET on Windows vs whatever on Linux and,
currently, I think that "whatever" has to be Mono.
 
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