I thought I’d mention a cool little patch we did to Python some years back.

We work with database tables a lot.  Game configuration data is essentially rows in a vast database.  And those rows contain a lot of floats.  At some point I recognized that common float values were not being reused.  In particular, id(0.0) != id(0.0).  I was a bit surprized by this, since I figured, some floats must be more common than others.  Certainly, 0.0 is a bit special.

I mentioned this on python-dev some years back but with somewhat underwhelming results.  A summary of the discussion can be found here.

Anyway, I thought I’d mention this to people doing a lot of floating point.  We saved a huge amount of memory on our servers just caching integral floating point values between -10 and +10, including both the negative and positive 0.0.  These values are very frequent, for example as multipliers in tables, and so on.

Here’s some of the code:

[C]

PyObject *
PyFloat_FromDouble(double fval)
{
    register PyFloatObject *op;
    int ival;
    if (free_list == NULL) {
        if ((free_list = fill_free_list()) == NULL)
            return NULL;
        /* CCP addition, cache common values */
        if (!f_reuse[0]) {
            int i;
            for(i = 0; i<21; i++)
                f_reuse[i] = PyFloat_FromDouble((double)(i-10));
        }
    }
    /* CCP addition, check for recycling */
    ival = (int)fval;
    if ((double)ival == fval && ival>=-10 && ival <= 10) {
#ifdef MS_WINDOWS
        /* ignore the negative zero */
        if (ival || _fpclass(fval) != _FPCLASS_NZ) {
#else
        /* can't differentiate between positive and negative zeroes, ignore both */
        if (ival) {
#endif
            ival+=10;
            if (f_reuse[ival]) {
                Py_INCREF(f_reuse[ival]);
                return f_reuse[ival];
            }
        }
    }

    /* Inline PyObject_New */
    op = free_list;
    free_list = (PyFloatObject *)Py_TYPE(op);
    PyObject_INIT(op, &PyFloat_Type);
    op->ob_fval = fval;
    return (PyObject *) op;
}

[/C]

(Please excuse the lame syntax highlighter with its & and < thingies 🙂