Generating a unique identifier

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:

> Should garbage-collecting 16 million strings really take 20+
> minutes?

It shouldn't.  For testing purposes I've created a set of 16 milion
strings like this:

s = set()
for n in xrange(16000000):
  s.add('somerandomprefix' + str(n))  # prefix makes the strings a bit larger

It takes maybe about 20 seconds to create the set.  Quitting Python
takes 4-5 seconds.  This is stock Python 2.5.1.