Question

It is said that Java is 10x faster than python in terms of performance. That’s what I see from benchmarks too. But what really brings down Java is the JVM startup time.

This is a test I made:

$time xlsx2csv.py Types\ of\ ESI\ v2.doc-emb-Package-9
...
<output skipped>
real    0m0.085s
user    0m0.072s
sys     0m0.013s


$time java  -jar -client /usr/local/bin/tika-app-0.7.jar -m Types\ of\ ESI\ v2.doc-emb-Package-9

real    0m2.055s
user    0m2.433s
sys     0m0.078s

Same file , a 12 KB ms XLSX embedded file inside Docx and Python is 25x faster !! WTH!!

It takes 2.055 sec for Java.

I know it is all due to startup time, but what i need is i need to call it via a script to parse some documents which i do not want to re-invent the wheel in python.

But as to parse 10k+ files , it is just not practical..

Anyway to speed it up (I already tried -client option and it only speed up by so little(20%) ).

My another idea? Run it as a long-running daemon , communicate using UDP or Linux-ICP sockets locally?

Answer 1

Try Nailgun.

Note: I don’t use it personally.