I've been a Perl guy for over 10 years but a friend convinced me to try Python and told me how much faster it is than Perl. So just for kicks I ported an app I wrote in Perl to Python and found that it runs about 3x slower. Initially my friend told me that I must have done it wrong, so I rewrote and refactored until I could rewrite and refactor no more and ... it's still a lot slower. So I did a simple test:

i = 0
j = 0

while (i < 100000000):
    i = i + 1
    j = j + 1

print j

$ time python python.py
100000000

real 0m48.100s
user 0m45.633s
sys 0m0.043s

my $i = 0;
my $j = 0;

while ($i < 100000000) {
    ++$i; # also tested $i = $i + 1 to be fair, same result
    ++$j;
}

print $j;

$ time perl perl.pl
100000000

real 0m24.757s
user 0m22.341s
sys 0m0.029s

Just under twice as slow, which doesn't seem to reflect any of the benchmarks I've seen ... is there a problem with my installation or is Python really that much slower than Perl?

python performance perl
Edit
Report