tests/seq.py

perf: add threading capability to perfbdiff

Since we are releasing the GIL during diffing, it is interesting to see how a
thread pool would perform on diffing. We add a new `--threads` argument to
commands. Synchronizing the thread pool is a bit complex because we want to be
able to reuse it from one run to another.

On my computer (i7 with 4 cores + hyperthreading), I get the following data for
about 12000 revisions:
threads wall        comb    wall gain   comb overhead
none    31.596715   31.59    0.00%       0.00%
1       31.621228   31.62   -0.08%       0.09%
2       16.406202   32.8    48.08%       3.83%
3       11.598334   34.76   63.29%      10.03%
4        9.205421   36.77   70.87%      16.40%
5        8.517604   42.51   73.04%      34.57%
6        7.94645    47.58   74.85%      50.62%
7        7.434972   51.92   76.47%      64.36%
8        7.070638   55.34   77.62%      75.18%

Compared to the feature disabled (threads=0), the overhead is negligible with
the threading code (threads=1), and the gain is already 48% with two threads.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# A portable replacement for 'seq'
#
# Usage:
#   seq STOP              [1, STOP] stepping by 1
#   seq START STOP        [START, STOP] stepping by 1
#   seq START STEP STOP   [START, STOP] stepping by STEP

from __future__ import absolute_import, print_function
import sys

if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
    xrange = range

start = 1
if len(sys.argv) > 2:
    start = int(sys.argv[1])

step = 1
if len(sys.argv) > 3:
    step = int(sys.argv[2])

stop = int(sys.argv[-1]) + 1

for i in xrange(start, stop, step):
    print(i)