built in zip function speed

[Rune Strand]

> so fastest overall

you may experience speed-ups by using

from itertools import izip

and just use izip() instead to avoid the module namespace lookup. The
same applies for the list.append() methods. If you're appending some
million times

a_list = []
a_list_append = a_list.append
a_list_append(value)

will be faster than

a_list.append(value)

but not much.