speedup up dictionary access

[Roy Smith]

aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
> >One of the big time consumers in an application I'm writing is a cache 
> >lookup in the inner loop of the program.  
> 
> How do you know that?

That's what the profiler says (or at least the profiler says the function 
which contains that, and not much else, is the culprit).  I suppose I could 
in-line the function, but that would be very messy, since it's called from 
many different places.

> That will be a tiny bit faster than the 'if', but not enough to make a
> difference if the cache lookup is really the problem.  You should
> probably spend some time thinking about the work you're actually trying
> to accomplish and whether you're going about it the right way.

Well, actually, I did spend some time thinking about it, and that's when I 
hit upon the idea of the cache, which won me almost a 10x speedup.  Now I'm 
looking for more :-)