[Python-ideas] Keep free list of popular iterator objects

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Sep 14, 2013, at 8:12 PM, Kyle Fisher <anthonyfk at gmail.com> wrote:

> We tend to do a lot of iterating over dictionaries in our product in some performance critical areas.  It occurred to me that allocating a new iterator object every single time seems a little wasteful, especially considering that there's probably only a handful of them alive at any time.  Doing a quick test with dictiterobject and 3 free lists (one for Keys, Values and Items) showed about a 4% speedup in this (best) case:


It is surprising that you saw any performance gain at all.

Python already has a default Python freelist scheme 
in the _PyObject_Malloc() function in Objects/obmalloc.c.

Another thought is that this isn't an inner-loop optimization.
The O(1) time for iterator creation is dominated by the O(n)
time to actually iterate over the dict keys, values, and items.

Raymond
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