SentencePiece Performance Benchmark¶

This directory contains scripts to benchmark the performance of the SentencePiece Python wrapper against Hugging Face Fast tokenizers and Tiktoken on a balanced raw multilingual dataset.

How to Run¶

Follow these steps in order from this benchmark directory:

1. Set Up the Environment¶

Run the setup script to create a virtual environment, build SentencePiece C++ and Python wrapper from local source, and install all dependencies:

./setup_env.sh

Note: This script will activate the virtual environment (venv) for the installation.

2. Activate the Virtual Environment¶

For subsequent steps, ensure the virtual environment is activated:

source venv/bin/activate

3. Download Models¶

Download the required model tokenizer files (T5 and Gemma 3) from Hugging Face:

python download_models.py

Note: google/gemma-3-4b is a gated model. You may need to run huggingface-cli login first or set the HF_TOKEN environment variable.

4. Prepare the Multilingual Dataset¶

Download parallel sentences from FLORES-200 and generate the interleaved, balanced raw text corpus:

python prepare_balanced_raw_multilingual.py

This saves the dataset to data/multilingual_raw_balanced.txt (~11.3 MB).

5. Run the Benchmark¶

Execute the benchmark configurations. This runs each tokenizer/thread configuration in a separate process to ensure clean isolation and respects thread settings:

python run_bench.py

This will run the benchmarks and save the raw performance metrics to results.json.

6. Analyze and View Results¶

Print the formatted performance comparison tables:

python analyze_results.py