[Numpy-discussion] slow numpy.clip ?

[David Cournapeau]

Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> Hi David
>
> The benchmark below isn't quite correct.  In clip2_bench the data is
> effectively only clipped once.  I attach a slightly modified version,
> for which the benchmark results look like this:
Yes, I of course mistyped the < and the copy. But the function is still 
moderately faster on my workstation:

  ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
        1    0.003    0.003    3.944    3.944 slowclip.py:10(bench_clip)
        1    0.011    0.011    2.001    2.001 slowclip.py:16(clip1_bench)
       10    1.990    0.199    1.990    0.199 
/home/david/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/numpy/core/fromnumeric.py:372(clip)
        1    1.682    1.682    1.682    1.682 slowclip.py:19(clip2_bench)
        1    0.258    0.258    0.258    0.258 
slowclip.py:6(generate_data_2d)
        0    0.000             0.000          profile:0(profiler)

I agree this is not really much a difference, though. The question is 
then, in the context of matplotlib, is there really a need to copy ? 
Because if I do not copy the array before clipping, then the function is 
really faster (for those wondering, this is one bottleneck when calling 
matplotlib.imshow, used in specgram and so on),

cheers,

David