Straw poll on Python performance (was Re: Python is far from a top performer ...)
Ken
kenfar42 at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 9 21:40:55 EST 2004
> Do you spend a "significant" amount of time actually optimizing your
> Python applications? (Significant is here defined as "more than five
> percent of your time", which is for example two hours a week in a
> 40-hour work week.)
Some of them.
I'm using python for data transformations: some feeds are small and
easily handled by python, however the large ones (10 million rows per
file) require a bit of thought to be spent on performance. However,
this isn't exactly python optimization - more like shifting high-level
pieces around in the architecture: merge two files or do a binary
lookup (nested-loop-join) one one? etc...
To make matters worse we just implemented a metadata-driven
transformation engine entirely written in python. It'll work great on
the small files, but the large ones...
Luckily, the nature of this application lends itself towards
distributed processing - so my plan is to:
1. check out psycho for the metadata-driven tool
2. partition the feeds across multiple servers
3. rewrite performance-intensive functions in c
But I think I'll get by with just options #1 and #2: we're using
python and it's working well - exactly because it is so adaptable.
The cost in performance is inconsequential in this case compared to
the maintainability.
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