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International Components for Unicode

Collation: ICU4C 3.8 vs. glibc-2.12.3-2

The performance test takes a locale and creates a RuleBasedCollator with default options. A large list of names is used as data in each test, where the names vary according to language. Each Collation operation over the whole list is repeated 1000 times. The percentage values in the final column are the most useful. They measure differences, where positive is better for ICU4C, and negative is better for the compared implementation.

Key

Operation Units Description
strcoll nanosecs Timing for string collation, an incremental compare of strings.
keygen nanosecs Timing for generation of sort keys, used to 'precompile' information so that subsequent operations can use binary comparison.
keylen bytes/char The average length of the generated sort keys, in bytes per character (Unicode/ISO 10646 code point). Generally this is the important field for sort key performance, since it directly impacts the time necessary for binary comparison, and the overhead of memory usage and retrieval time for sort keys.

Data

                                      -------- ICU --------   ------ glibc -------      (GLIBC - ICU)/ICU
Locale     Data file                  strcoll keygen  keylen  strcoll keygen  keylen    coll  keygen  keylen
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
en_US      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      84    665    1.52  |   251   1175    3.04 |  199%    77%     99%
da_DK      TestNames_Latin.txt      |     155    936    1.53  |   263   1194    3.00 |   70%    28%     96%
de_DE      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      84    662    1.52  |   251   1175    3.00 |  199%    77%     96%
fr_FR      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      84   1012    1.52  |   252   1178    3.00 |  200%    16%     96%
ja_JP      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      84    668    1.52  |   248    440    1.00 |  195%   -34%    -34%
ja_JP      TestNames_Japanese_h.txt |     159    512    3.19  |   829    981    4.23 |  421%    92%     33%
ja_JP      TestNames_Japanese_k.txt |     164    505    3.19  |   798    901    3.87 |  387%    78%     21%
ja_JP      TestNames_Asian.txt      |     175    426    3.23  |   524    769    4.08 |  199%    81%     26%
zh_CN      TestNames_Latin.txt      |     103   1048    1.53  |   251   1171    3.03 |  144%    12%     98%
zh_CN      TestNames_Chinese.txt    |     172    297    3.79  |   516    644    6.20 |  200%   117%     64%
zh_CN      TestNames_Simplified_Chin|     170    295    3.79  |   534    642    6.26 |  214%   118%     65%
zh_TW      TestNames_Latin.txt      |     103   1055    1.53  |   251   1171    3.03 |  144%    11%     98%
zh_TW      TestNames_Chinese.txt    |     137    231    3.32  |   527    649    6.24 |  285%   181%     88%
ko_KR      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      85    665    1.52  |   248    440    1.00 |  192%   -34%    -34%
ko_KR      TestNames_Korean.txt     |     240    426    4.32  |   457    318    3.32 |   90%   -25%    -23%
ru_RU      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      84    663    1.52  |   250   1171    3.00 |  198%    77%     96%
ru_RU      TestNames_Russian.txt    |     149   1228    1.62  |   440   3423    5.00 |  195%   179%    208%
th_TH      TestNames_Latin.txt      |      85    994    1.61  |   251   1196    3.76 |  195%    20%    133%
th_TH      TestNames_Thai.txt       |     311   1444    1.61  |   792   2912    7.40 |  155%   102%    359%

Notes

  1. As with all performance measurements, the results will vary according to the hardware and compiler. The strcoll operation is particularly sensitive; we have found that even slight changes in code alignment can produce 10% differences.
  2. For more information on incremental vs. sort key comparison, the importance of multi-level sorting, and other features of collation, see Unicode Collation (UCA).
  3. For general information on ICU collation see User Guide.
  4. For information on APIs, see C, C++, or Java.