Straw poll on Python performance (was Re: Python is far from a top performer ...)

[Tim Delaney]

From: "Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com>

> This is my "straw poll" question:
>
>   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.)

I have to say that I do, but I'm also dealing with datasets up to about
500MB in the worst case - but about 10-20MB in the normal case.

In most cases, the optimisations are things like only doing a single pass
over any file, etc. A naive prototype often doesn't scale well when I need
to deal with large datasets. Often using psyco will be sufficient to get me
over the hurdle (see the psyco thread) but sometimes not.

Tim Delaney