`form_clean()` performance

[David Smith]

I ran the ran the benchmark suite to see if anything had changed in the last few months. See ​link

This highlighted a regression (c.15% increase) in the performance form_clean() following this ​commit, see ​benchmark.

I'm not certain what to suggest here, or if it's even that much of an issue and should be wontfixed, but thought it best to atleast raise.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Thanks! It's definitely worth investigating.

[Chris Jerdonek]

That ticket (#32920) was primarily about correctness rather than trying to do anything about performance. Nevertheless, one possible optimization that occurred to me while working on it was adding a flag to BaseForm called something like self._bound_fields_cache_filled. Then, the ​BaseForm._bound_items() and ​BaseForm.__iter__() iterators could consult that flag at their outset. If set, the BoundField items could be served directly from self._bound_fields_cache instead of going through the extra layer of indirection of BaseForm.__getitem__(). However, I don't know what's contributing most in terms of the slow-down. Maybe it's that BoundField.initial ​uses @cached_property?

[Simon Charette]

While this particular commit was made to address a correctness issue the recent influx in optimization PRs merged in the past weeks made me wonder if we'd rather invest in having some form of CI to confirm their benefit in the grand scheme of things.

I greatly appreciate having David run these benchmark from time to time but it'd be great to back optimization PRs with addition to the performance suite to make sure we don't trade one improvement for another over time. It would seem like a reasonable ask given how invested we are in writing regression tests for all bug fixes and feature additions?

Thoughts? Maybe I should bring that up on the mailing list instead?

[Chris Jerdonek]

Thoughts?

If a PR's purpose is to optimize, but it adds complexity (like adding caching), then it seems reasonable to me that there be an objective measure that people can look to that shows improvement. A related example: just in the last couple days, it was pointed out in ​this PR that _lazy_re_compile() (which was originally added as an optimization) was actually slower in one instance. How many more are like that?

On the other hand, if a PR is doing something like removing a redundant operation or eliminating an unneeded argument, I think it should be okay even if a benchmark doesn't show a noticeable improvement. I know in some cases like that, the commit message wound up saying something like "Optimized ...," even if the impact might not really be noticeable. (I think a message like "Simplified ..." or "Removed redundant ..." might be more accurate in cases like that, so it doesn't overstate the impact.)

[Carlton Gibson]

+1 to building on David's work: I believe the next stage is that we need to provision the benchmarks to run on small but otherwise empty instance, that isn't David's own machine — But I guess details can be discussed on the django-bench repo… — general point is it would be great to have these running regularly (maybe daily on main, and PRs on request?)

[David Smith]

Replying to Carlton Gibson:

But I guess details can be discussed on the django-bench repo… 

I finally got round to finishing my thoughts on benchmarking more generally. ​see post.