Edgewall Software

Version 22 (modified by anonymous, 18 years ago) (diff)

s/Markup/Genshi (again)

Performance of the Genshi Template Engine

The directory examples/bench has some very simple benchmarks to compare the performance of Genshi to other template engines.

It should be noted that text-based template engines generally have a lot less work to do than XML-based ones, simply because their functionality is limited to processing text as opposed to processing markup.

basic benchmark

The basic.py benchmark is based on a relatively simple template that includes a lot of the common templating constructs, such as includes/inheritance, looping, conditionals, macros, etc.

All tests run under Python 2.4.3 on Mac OS X (MacBook 2GHz).

Template Engine Rendering time (less is better) Notes
Genshi 4.05 ms
Clearsilver 0.33 ms ClearSilver is a text-based template engine written in C.
Django 1.84 ms Text-based template engine that comes with the Django framework.
Kid 5.12 ms Kid templates are compiled to Python byte-code. The cElementTree implementation was used for this test, although using the Python implementation doesn't appear to make a significant difference.
SimpleTAL 3.13 ms Another XML-based template engine written in Python, based on the Zope template engine (TAL).

The test template is rather simple right now and doesn't make much use of the advanced features provided by either Genshi or Kid, because then it would be impossible to implement an equivalent template using other template languages.

bigtable benchmark

The bigtable.py benchmark renders a large HTML table (with 1000 rows and 10 columns) in two nested loops, where each cell contains a variable reference. This basically measures the raw throughput of the template engine, while not using any advanced features.

Template Engine Rendering time (less is better) Notes
Genshi 661 ms
Kid 720 ms
Django 357 ms
ElementTree 329 ms Not a template engine: the benchmark simply constructs the XML tree in memory and serializes it.
cElementTree 202 ms Not a template engine: the benchmark simply constructs the XML tree in memory and serializes it.
Clearsilver 102 ms

Another benchmark

There's another simple benchmark in the Genshi repository: examples/basic. That example is however only implemented for Genshi and Kid. Here are the numbers:

Template Engine Rendering time (less is better) Notes
Genshi 4.00 ms
Kid 8.93 ms

I'm not quite sure why the difference between Genshi and Kid is so much more drastic in this example compared to the above. It does define more (and slightly more sophisticated) match templates, which would suggest that Genshi implements those more efficiently. However, that's just a theory.