Splitting lists

[Alex Martelli]

Steven Taschuk wrote:

> Quoth Létezõ:
>> Thanks to Steven for the performance analysis and Alex & Duncan for the
>> their more impressive solutions. It would be interesting to insert the
>> new "impressive" solutions into the performace test loop. Which is the
>> fastest?
> 
> Short and long list trials:
> 
>     viktor1           9.56   9.17
>     viktor2           8.60   8.30
>     viktor2lookup     6.00   5.72
>     viktor3          12.08  14.19
>     duncan            8.70   8.49
>     duncanlookup      6.04   5.76
>     alex              6.47   6.18

Interestingly, my numbers are a bit different:

[alex at lancelot logs]$ python2.3 -O ti.py
viktor1           1.06   1.06
viktor2           0.78   0.77
viktor2lookup     0.66   0.62
viktor3           1.33   1.58
duncan            0.81   0.80
duncanlookup      0.70   0.67
alex              0.71   0.70
[alex at lancelot logs]$

This isn't a particularly hi-end machine -- it's a 1.2 GHz Athlon
PC with DDR 2100 RAM and Linux Mandrake 9.0, reasonably cheap even
when I bought it almost two years ago.  This may perhaps indicate
that the best way to speed algorithms up is to purchase halfway
decent hardware no more than a couple of years old, and run a free
operating system &c on it...?-)

Anyway, on my machine "viktor2lookup" -- the simplest approach,
except that the append bound methods are looked up into local
variables just once before the loop -- is repeatably fastest
on this particular test.


Alex