How to increase the speed of this program?

[Klaas]

Klaas wrote:
> Klaas wrote:
>
> > In fact, you can make it about 4x faster by balancing:
> >
> > [klaas at worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
> > "array('c','\0'*200)*500"
> > 10000 loops, best of 3: 32.4 usec per loop
>
> This is an unclean minimally-tested patch which achieves reasonable
> performance (about 10x faster than unpatched python):

<snip>

Never mind, that patch is bogus.  A updated patch is here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1605020&group_id=5470&atid=305470

-Mike