Kudos to Matthew, Ines and others making this possible.
I haven't checked it out myself yet, so I wanted to ask that are the performance issues fixed that were haunting the 2.0 alpha version?
I haven't checked it out myself yet, so I wanted to ask that are the performance issues fixed that were haunting the 2.0 alpha version?
I'm getting around 8k words per second on the smallest Google Cloud instances. You couldn't run spaCy 1 on these instances (or on AWS lambda) due to memory usage problems, especially problems predicting memory usage for long-running processes. This is why we say spaCy 2 is cheaper to run in a cents-per-word sense than spaCy 1. This is the performance measure that we think is most important.
However, users are still reporting performance problems, so I wouldn't call the issue resolved. spaCy 1 managed to avoid depending on numpy during prediction, making it easy to ensure that performance didn't depend on anyone's environment. spaCy 2 currently does use numpy, introducing these questions around configuration. I'm working to fix this by implementing the forward pass entirely in Cython.
So if you have an event based system where you can process only a single document at once, it does not make sense to upgrade yet, because for a single document case the runtime performance was 10x-100x slower, at least with 2.0 alpha version.