Why is numpy sum 10 times slower than the + operator?

The main difference is larger overhead when a.sum(axis=1) is calculated. Calculating a reduction (in this case sum) is not a trivial matter:

• one has to take the round-off errors into account and thus uses pairwise summation to reduce it.
• tiling is important for bigger arrays, as it makes the most out of the available cache
• In order to be able to use the SIMD-instructions/out-of-order execution abilities of modern CPUs one should calculate multiple rows in parallel

I have discussed the topics above in more details for example here and here.

However, all this is not needed and not better than a naive summation if there are only two elements to add - you get the same result but with much less overhead and faster.

For only 1000 elements, the overhead of calling numpy functionality is probably higher than actually doing these 1000 additions (or multiplications for that matter, because on modern CPUs pipelined additions/multiplications have the same cost) -as you can see, that for 10^4 the running time is only about 2 times higher, a sure sign that overhead plays a bigger role for 10^3! In this answer the impact of overhead and cache misses is investigated in more details.

Let's take a look at profiler-result to see whether the theory above holds (I use perf):

For a.sum(axis=1):

  17,39%  python   umath.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so       [.] reduce_loop
  11,41%  python   umath.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so       [.] pairwise_sum_DOUBLE
   9,78%  python   multiarray.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so  [.] npyiter_buffered_reduce_iternext_ite
   9,24%  python   umath.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so       [.] DOUBLE_add
   4,35%  python   python3.6                                   [.] _PyEval_EvalFrameDefault
   2,17%  python   multiarray.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so  [.] _aligned_strided_to_contig_size8_src
   2,17%  python   python3.6                                   [.] lookdict_unicode_nodummy
   ...

The overhead of using reduce_loop, pairwise_sum_DOUBLE is dominating.

For a[:,0]+a[:,1]):

   7,24%  python   python3.6                                   [.] _PyEval_EvalF
   5,26%  python   python3.6                                   [.] PyObject_Mall
   3,95%  python   python3.6                                   [.] visit_decref
   3,95%  python   umath.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so       [.] DOUBLE_add
   2,63%  python   python3.6                                   [.] PyDict_SetDef
   2,63%  python   python3.6                                   [.] _PyTuple_Mayb
   2,63%  python   python3.6                                   [.] collect
   2,63%  python   python3.6                                   [.] fast_function
   2,63%  python   python3.6                                   [.] visit_reachab
   1,97%  python   python3.6                                   [.] _PyObject_Gen

As expected: Python overhead plays a big role, a simple DOUBLE_add is used.

---

There are less overhead when calling a.sum()

• for once, reduce_loop isn't called for every row but only once, which means considerable less overhead.
• no new resulting arrays are created, there is no longer need to write 1000 doubles to the memory.

so it can be expected, that a.sum() is faster (despite the fact, that 2000 and not 1000 addition must be made - but as we have seen it is mostly about overhead and the actual work - the additions aren't responsible for the big share of the running time).

---

Data obtaining by running:

perf record python run.py
perf report

and

#run.py
import numpy as np
a=np.random.rand(1000,2)

for _ in range(10000):
  a.sum(axis=1)
  #a[:,0]+a[:,1]