Speed: bytecode vz C API calls

[Jacek Generowicz]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:

> In article <tyf7k171jbq.fsf at pcepsft001.cern.ch>,
> Jacek Generowicz  <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
> >
> >I have a program in which I make very good use of a memoizer:
> >
> >  def memoize(callable):
> >      cache = {}
> >      def proxy(*args):
> >          try: return cache[args]
> >          except KeyError: return cache.setdefault(args, callable(*args))
> >      return proxy
> >
> >I've got to the stage where my program is still not fast enough, and
> >calls to the memoizer proxy are topping profiler output table. So I
> >thought I'd try to see whether I can speed it up by recoding it in C.
> 
> I'm wondering whether you're tackling something the wrong way 

There _is_ always that possibility, but I don't think that's what my
problem is here (it may well be elsewhere in my program).

> or perhaps you need to throw hardware at the problem.

The definition of "not fast enough" in this case, is "much slower than
a competing C++ implementation", so throwing hardware at it advances
me not one bit, I'm afraid.

> Dicts are one of the most highly optimized parts of Python,

Which is exactly why I'm using them extensively.

> and if your cache hit rate is higher than 90%, you'll be dealing
> with exceptions only rarely,

My cache hit rate is well over 90%.

> so the speed of cache.setdefault() isn't where your time is going.
> I'm wondering whether you're hitting some kind of memory issue or
> something, or possibly you're having cache effects (in CPU/memory),
> or maybe even your key is poorly constructed so that you're getting
> hash duplicates.

No, I think that my memoizer works just fine. The "problem" is that
I've memoized a lot of functions, and quite a few of them are being
called in my inner loops. If I want to compete on speed with C++, I'm
simply going have to eliminate Python bytecode from my inner loops[*].


[*] Unless my overall algorithm is completely wrong, of course.