help with making my code more efficient

[Larry.Martell at gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 20, 2012 8:31:18 PM UTC-7, Dave Angel wrote:
> On 12/20/2012 08:46 PM, Larry.Martell at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday, December 20, 2012 6:17:04 PM UTC-7, Dave Angel wrote:
> 
> >> <snip>
> 
> > Of course it's a fragment - it's part of a large program and I was just showing the relevant parts. 
> 
> But it seems these are methods in a class, or something, so we're
> missing context.  And you use self without it being an argument to the
> function.  Like it's a global.

I didn't show the entire method, only what I thought was relevant to my issue. The method is declared as:

    def generate_data(self):

> 
> > <snip>
> 
> > Yes, the code works. I end up with just the rows I want.
> 
> >> Are you only concerned about speed, not fixing features?  
> 
> > Don't know what you mean by 'fixing features'. The code does what I want, it just takes too long.
> 
> >
> 
> >> As far as I can tell, the logic that includes the time comparison is bogus.  
> 
> > Not at all. 
> 
> >
> 
> >> You don't do  anything there to worry about the value of tup[2], just whether some
> 
> >> item has a nearby time.  Of course, I could misunderstand the spec.
> 
> > The data comes from a database. tup[2] is a datetime column. tdiff comes from a datetime.timedelta() 
> 
> I thought that tup[1] was the datetime.  In any case, the loop makes no
> sense to me, so I can't really optimize it, just make suggestions.

Yes, tup[1] is the datetime. I mistyped last night. 

> >> Are you making a global called 'self' ?  That name is by convention only
> 
> >> used in methods to designate the instance object.  What's the attribute
> 
> >> self?
> 
> > Yes, self is my instance object. self.message contains the string of interest that I need to look for. 
> 
> >
> 
> >> Can cdata have duplicates, and are they significant? 
> 
> > No, it will not have duplicates.
> 
> >
> 
> >> Is the list sorted in any way?
> 
> > Yes, the list is sorted by tool and datetime.
> 
> >
> 
> >> Chances are your performance bottleneck is the doubly-nested loop.  You
> 
> >> have a list comprehension at top-level code, and inside it calls a
> 
> >> function that also loops over the 600,000 items.  So the inner loop gets
> 
> >> executed 360 billion times.  You can cut this down drastically by some
> 
> >> judicious sorting, as well as by having a map of lists, where the map is
> 
> >> keyed by the tool.
> 
> > Thanks. I will try that.
> 
> 
> 
> So in your first loop, you could simply split the list into separate
> lists, one per tup[0] value, and the lists as dictionary items, keyed by
> that tool string.
> 
> Then inside the determine() function, make a local ref to the particular
> 
> list for the tool.
> 
>    recs = messageTimes[tup[0]]

I made that change ant went from taking over 2 hours to 54 minutes. A dramatic improvement, but still not adequate for my app. 

> Instead of a for loop over recs, use a binary search to identify the
> first item that's >= date_time-tdiff.  Then if it's less than
> date_time+tdiff, return True, otherwise False.  Check out the bisect
> module.  Function bisect_left() should do what you want in a sorted list.

Didn't know about bisect. Thanks. I thought it would be my savior for sure. But unfortunaly when I added that, it blows up with out of memory. This was the code I had:

times = messageTimes[tup[0]]
le = bisect.bisect_right(times, tup[1])
ge = bisect.bisect_left(times, tup[1])
return (le and tup[1]-times[le-1] <= tdiff) or (ge != len(times) and times[ge]-tup[1] <= tdiff)

> >>> cdata[:] = [tup for tup in cdata if determine(tup)]
> 
> >> As the code exists, there's no need to copy the list.  Just do a simple 
> >> bind.
> 
> > This statement is to remove the items from cdata that I don't want. I don't know what you mean by bind. I'm not familiar with that python function. 
> 
> Every "assignment" to a simple name is really a rebinding of that name.
> cdata = [tup for tup in cdata if determine(tup)]
> 
> will rebind the name to the new object, much quicker than copying.  If
> this is indeed a top-level line, it should be equivalent.  But if in
> fact this is inside some other function, it may violate some other
> assumptions.  In particular, if there are other names for the same
> object, then you're probably stuck with modifying it in place, using
> slice notation.

The slice notation  was left over when when cdata was a tuple. Now that it's a list I don't need that any more. 

> BTW, a set is generally much more memory efficient than a dict, when you
> don't use the "value".  But since I think you'll be better off with a
> dict of lists, it's a moot point.

I'm going back to square 1 and try and do all from SQL.