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

[Michael T. Babcock]

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

I have one customer for whom I'm writing software to parse large (~1GB) 
Quark Express documents and for the initial months of the project, 
optimization was a large piece of the coding process.  Rewriting and 
rewriting to get the information I needed as quickly as possible.

Considering the initial version of the program took all night to parse 
the file and I'm down to about 40 minutes now, its been quite a ride.  
That said, over the entire length of the project, about 80-90% of my 
time will be straight user interface coding with very little (or no) 
time spent on optimization, so my net optimization time by the end of 
the project will be quite low again.

This is similar to a comment made by someone else re: library 
programmers now that I think about it.
-- 
Michael T. Babcock
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/code