Rakudo+parrot benchmarking for 2011.07

[Patrick R. Michaud]

For the last several months I've periodically run a small suite
of benchmark tests on various versions of Rakudo and Parrot, just
to see how performance is changing over time.  I started this
project in April, when I noticed that Parrot performance had
substantially declined since January on several of my systems.

The latest results for Rakudo 2011.07 and Parrot 3.6.0 are now 
available on github:

  https://github.com/pmichaud/rpbench-results/blob/master/orange-x86_64-3521m-201107311811.txt
  https://github.com/pmichaud/rpbench-results/blob/master/plum-x86_64-2931m-201107310050.txt
  https://github.com/pmichaud/rpbench-results/blob/master/kiwi-x86_64-3496m-201107310641.txt
  https://github.com/pmichaud/rpbench-results/blob/master/kiwi-x86_64-7994m-201107302349.txt

These are run on various machines I have available to me for testing, with
a variety of processor and memory footprints (all are running Kubuntu
2011.04).  We're currently using the 2011.01 / 3.0.0 release as a 
baseline for comparison.  Lower numbers indicate better (faster) 
performance.

The programs used to create these benchmark results are in
http://github.com/pmichaud/rpbench .  As of this morning I don't
have any instructions written for using the suite, but will likely
add some shortly.

Pm