Running with pypy for speed improvements

I was looking at installing psyco to try an speed up the skeining process but noticed that they have not yet added full support for 2.7 python and mention that all new development is in pypy. Pypy has just had a 1.7 release so I thought I would give it a try.

[PyPy.org]

I just downloaded it then ran "pypy skienforge.py file.stl" as it did not have the tk libs to run the GUI.

Results so far rendering the small funnel from [www.thingiverse.com]

Python 2.7 - 3m30s
PyPy - 1m42

So, from that rather unscientific test, it's quite a bit quicker but then I did a diff of the files and the XY coords are just a little off. I have not tried printing it yet.

Has anybody else tried? Is there some difference in the maths, rounding etc.

john

Hi,

I too have played around with PyPy. The resulting gcode is almost the same - there are always some rounding errors due to floating point arithmetic. (In fact I found that subsequent runs of Skeinforge itself can produce slightly different results due to this, very disconcerting but ultimately harmless at this resolution)

I found that the overhead of the PyPy JIT makes it unsuitable for small files, but the benefits become progressively bigger as the file size/complexity increases. For example I used it on a mendel plate (~150k vertices) and it reduced the skein time from 45 minutes to 11.

As you mention, because Skeinforge has a dependency on TKinter it can only be run from the command line when using PyPy - I had a couple of problems getting it to use the correct profile, but that could have been simple user error

Cheers,
Gary

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Could you please share how you did to install and run Skeinforge with Pypy?

I've been struggling all day with this but can't get the TKInter to work.

Thank you

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Ernesto Pareja

dcctrains.netne.net

I think Cura does that (skeinforge with PyPy), among other things.

[www.thingiverse.com]

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Most of my technical comments should be correct, but is THIS one ?
Anyway, as a rule of thumb, always double check what people write.