help with making my code more efficient

[Larry.Martell at gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 20, 2012 5:38:03 PM UTC-7, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Larry.Martell at gmail.com
> 
> <Larry.Martell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > This code works, but it takes way too long to run - e.g. when cdata has 600,000 elements (which is typical for my app) it takes 2 hours for this to run.
> 
> >
> 
> > Can anyone give me some suggestions on speeding this up?
> 
> >
> 
> 
> 
> It sounds like you may have enough data to want to not keep it all in
> 
> memory. Have you considered switching to a database? You could then
> 
> execute SQL queries against it.

It came from a database. Originally I was getting just the data I wanted using SQL, but that was taking too long also. I was selecting just the messages I wanted, then for each one of those doing another query to get the data within the time diff of each. That was resulting in tens of thousands of queries. So I changed it to pull all the potential matches at once and then process it in python.