Processing large CSV files - how to maximise throughput?

[Victor Hooi]

Hi,

We have a directory of large CSV files that we'd like to process in Python.

We process each input CSV, then generate a corresponding output CSV file.

input CSV -> munging text, lookups etc. -> output CSV

My question is, what's the most Pythonic way of handling this? (Which I'm assuming 

For the reading, I'd

    with open('input.csv', 'r') as input, open('output.csv', 'w') as output:
        csv_writer = DictWriter(output)
        for line in DictReader(input):
            # Do some processing for that line...
            output = process_line(line)
            # Write output to file
            csv_writer.writerow(output)
            
So for the reading, it'll iterates over the lines one by one, and won't read it into memory which is good.

For the writing - my understanding is that it writes a line to the file object each loop iteration, however, this will only get flushed to disk every now and then, based on my system default buffer size, right?

So if the output file is going to get large, there isn't anything I need to take into account for conserving memory?

Also, if I'm trying to maximise throughput of the above, is there anything I could try? The processing in process_line is quite line - just a bunch of string splits and regexes.

If I have multiple large CSV files to deal with, and I'm on a multi-core machine, is there anything else I can do to boost throughput?

Cheers,
Victor