Tremendous slowdown due to garbage collection

[Aaron Watters]

> A question often asked--and I am not a big a fan of these sorts of
> questions, but it is worth thinking about--of people who are creating
> very large data structures in Python is "Why are you doing that?"
> That is, you should consider whether some kind of database solution
> would be better.  You mention lots of dicts--it sounds like some
> balanced B-trees with disk loading on demand could be a good choice.

Well, probably because you can get better
than 100x improved performance
if you don't involve the disk and use clever in memory indexing.
BTW, I think the default behaviour of the gc is
pretty silly.  I tend to disable automatic gc and explicitly put in
collections when I know I'm done with some big operation these
days.
   -- Aaron Watters

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http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=dumb+slow