GC is very expensive: am I doing something wrong?

tan tan at nowhere.land
Mon Mar 22 19:40:16 EDT 2010


In article <mailman.1060.1269243742.23598.python-list at python.org>, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
>Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 22.03.2010 00:36:
>> Terry Reedy wrote:
>>> No one has discovered a setting
>>> of the internal tuning parameters for which there are no bad patterns
>>> and I suspect there are not any such. This does not negate Xavier's
>>> suggestion that a code change might also solve your problem.
>>
>> Could it be that for implementing a structure like a trie as the OP is,
>> where a lot of CPU cycles can be spent manipulating the structure, a high-
>> level language like Python, Perl or Ruby just gets in the way?
>
>I would rather say that the specific problem of the trie data structure is 
>that it has extremely little benefit over other available data structures.

Not true.
 
>There may still be a couple of niches where it makes sense to consider it 
>as an alternative, but given that dicts are so heavily optimised in Python, 
>it'll be hard for tries to compete even when written in a low-level language.

It depends. If your data is not in nearly sorted order,
trees are some of the best mechanisms available.

>Remember that the original use case was to load a dictionary from a text 
>file. For this use case, a trie can be very wasteful in terms of memory and 
>rather CPU cache unfriendly on traversal, whereas hash values are a) rather 
>fast to calculate for a string, and b) often just calculated once and then 
>kept alive in the string object for later reuse.

You still have to walk the bucket in a hash map/table.
Performance may be orders of magnitude worse than for trees.

>> My feeling would be, try to get the language to do as much of the work for
>> you as possible. If you can’t do that, then you might be better off with a
>> lower-level language.
>
>I agree with the first sentence, but I'd like to underline the word 'might' 
>in the second. As this newsgroup shows, very often it's enough to look for 
>a better algorithmic approach first.
>
>Stefan
>

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