Christian Hansen

In December last year released the first version of Time::Moment. I don't foresee any major changes in Time::Moment 0.16 API, so in next release I'll remove the "early preview release" notice in the description. I have been using 0.16 in production two different deployments with great success, by removing DateTime from the ORM we have seen significantly reduced the memory usage and CPU usage and increased the throughput when inflating timestamps from a RDBM, previously DateTime was a one of our bottleneck in our profiling.

A couple of years ago I was faced with a ultimatum, either you make this code (a perl code base) faster and use less CPU and memory or we will have to move to another language or implementation. The code base in question processed logs and inflated a DateTime.pm for every timestamp. At that time i looked at DateTime source and decided that I would be better of with a more efficient implantation in C which I could glue to Perl/XS. Well, I couldn't find a codebase, so I had to develop one from scratch (the birth of c-dt), and so I did and solved the clients need.

The core for Time::Moment base is based on c-dt which has been in usage for several years.

iMac-27:p5-time-moment chansen$ perl dev/bench.pl 
Benchmarking constructor: ->new()
                  Rate     DateTime Time::Moment
DateTime       25259/s           --         -99%
Time::Moment 2041902/s        7984%           --

Benchmarking constructor: ->now()

                  Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece  localtime() Time::Moment

DateTime       13865/s           --         -94%         -99%         -99%

Time::Piece   223194/s        1510%           --         -80%         -87%

localtime()  1097543/s        7816%         392%           --         -34%

Time::Moment 1657189/s       11853%         642%          51%           --

Benchmarking constructor: ->now_utc()

                  Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece     gmtime() Time::Moment

DateTime       29008/s           --         -87%         -98%         -99%

Time::Piece   230440/s         694%           --         -83%         -92%

gmtime()     1361443/s        4593%         491%           --         -52%

Time::Moment 2829107/s        9653%        1128%         108%           --

Benchmarking constructor: ->from_epoch()

                  Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece Time::Moment

DateTime       29896/s           --         -88%         -99%

Time::Piece   242526/s         711%           --         -92%

Time::Moment 3104830/s       10286%        1180%           --

Benchmarking accessor: ->year()

                   Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece Time::Moment

DateTime     3194172/s           --         -14%         -59%

Time::Piece  3709584/s          16%           --         -52%

Time::Moment 7796400/s         144%         110%           --

Benchmarking arithmetic: +10 days -10 days

                  Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece Time::Moment

DateTime        3532/s           --         -98%        -100%

Time::Piece   157780/s        4367%           --         -94%

Time::Moment 2667260/s       75417%        1590%           --

Benchmarking: at end of current month

                  Rate     DateTime Time::Moment

DateTime        2767/s           --        -100%

Time::Moment 1460621/s       52690%           --

Benchmarking strftime: ->strftime('%FT%T')

                     Rate     DateTime POSIX::strftime  Time::Piece Time::Moment

DateTime          91116/s           --            -65%         -82%         -94%

POSIX::strftime  263224/s         189%              --         -49%         -83%

Time::Piece      515384/s         466%             96%           --         -67%

Time::Moment    1579032/s        1633%            500%         206%           --

Benchmarking sort: 1000 instants

               Rate     DateTime  Time::Piece Time::Moment

DateTime     22.7/s           --         -70%         -98%

Time::Piece  77.0/s         239%           --         -93%

Time::Moment 1135/s        4894%        1374%           --

iMac-27:p5-time-moment chansen$ perl dev/sizeof.pl 
Comparing instance size:
Time::Moment ............... :  104 B
Time::Piece ................ :  456 B
localtime() ................ :  296 B
DateTime ................... : 4019 B
DateTime w/o zone and locale : 2545 B

Comparing Storable::nfreeze() size:

Time::Moment ............... :   34 B

DateTime ................... :  156 B