Benchmarks

Test System

• 15-inch Macbook Air M2, 2023 (my personal laptop)
• rust-parallel uses 8 parallel jobs by default on this machine
• MacOS 14.1.1

Test Setup

• Run echo on 1000 strings 1 to 1000
• Benchmarks run using hyperfine testing tool
• Link to benchmark script

Summary

• rust-parallel is 1.35 times faster when the path cache is enabled (this is enabled by default)
• rust-parallel is 2.09 times faster than xargs with 8 processes. Note that this use of xargs does not prevent output interleaving.
• rust-parallel is 11.80 times faster than GNU parallel

Versions

$ rust-parallel -V
rust-parallel 1.11.0

$ parallel -V
GNU parallel 20231122

Results

$ hyperfine --warmup 3 \
  'seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel echo' \
  'seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel --disable-path-cache echo' \
  'seq 1 1000 | xargs -P8 -L1 echo' \
  'seq 1 1000 | parallel echo'

Benchmark 1: seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel echo
  Time (mean ± σ):     166.3 ms ±   0.9 ms    [User: 218.6 ms, System: 611.7 ms]
  Range (min … max):   164.7 ms … 168.1 ms    17 runs

Benchmark 2: seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel --disable-path-cache echo
  Time (mean ± σ):     225.2 ms ±   1.1 ms    [User: 260.1 ms, System: 872.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):   223.7 ms … 227.7 ms    13 runs

Benchmark 3: seq 1 1000 | xargs -P8 -L1 echo
  Time (mean ± σ):     347.0 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 154.7 ms, System: 522.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):   345.0 ms … 349.8 ms    10 runs

Benchmark 4: seq 1 1000 | parallel echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.961 s ±  0.018 s    [User: 2.545 s, System: 3.484 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.940 s …  1.995 s    10 runs

Summary
  seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel echo ran
    1.35 ± 0.01 times faster than seq 1 1000 | rust-parallel --disable-path-cache echo
    2.09 ± 0.02 times faster than seq 1 1000 | xargs -P8 -L1 echo
   11.80 ± 0.13 times faster than seq 1 1000 | parallel echo