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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Amazing Speedup

A library had unit tests that ran for almost 600 seconds. Two small changes dropped the run time to 26 seconds.

I was amazed.

Step 1. I turned on the cProfile. I added two methods to the slowest unit test module.

def profile():
    import cProfile
    cProfile.run( 'main()', 'the_slow_module.prof' )
    report()

def report():
    import pstats
    p = pstats.Stats( 'the_slow_module.prof' )
    p.sort_stats('time').print_callees(24)
Now I can add profiling or simply review the report. Looking at the "callees" provided some hints as to why a particular method was so slow.

Step 2. I replaced ElementTree with cElementTree (duh.) Everyone should know this. I didn't realize how much this mattered. The trick is to note how much time was spent doing XML parsing. In the case of this unit test suite, it was a LOT of time. In the case of the overall application that uses this library, that won't be true.

Step 3. The slowest method was assembling a list. It did a lot of list.append(), and list.__len__(). It looked approximately like the following.


def something( self ):
result= []
for index, value in some_source:
    while len(result)+1 != index:
        result.append( None )
    result.append( SomeClass( value ) )
return result

This is easily replaced by a generator. The API changes, so every use of this method function may need to be modified to use the generator instead of the list object.


def something_iter( self ):
 counter= 0
 for index, value in some_source:
     while counter+1 != index:
         yield None
         counter += 1
     yield SomeClass( value )
     counter += 1

The generator was significantly faster than list assembly.

Two minor code changes and a significant speed-up.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting. You may consider just using a list comprehension or generator expression as well for that second piece:

    [ [None]*index + [SomeClass(value)] for index,value in source ]

    itertools.chain.from_iterable( ( itertools.chain( itertools.repeat(None, index), [SomeClass(value)] ) for index, value in source ) )

    This arguably simplifies the code by removing the explicit "counter" variable, and the nested loop.

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  2. I take it index from some_source must be increasing and start at least with 1? (The latter because starting at zero, which seems more natural for a general index, results in an infinite loop: counter + 1 will never equal 0. Was this an error in simplifying for the blog?)

    @Kurt: You can't eliminate counter as in either of those, as the number of Nones depends on the difference between successive indexes, not on index alone. Your code gives a different result.

    And realizing the importance is the difference between successive indexes leads me to write (how to format code for blogspot?):

    def something_iter():
    ..cur_index = 1 # instead of 0 for reason above
    ..for next_index, value in some_source:
    ....for _ in xrange(cur_index, next_index):
    ......yield None
    ....cur_index = next_index
    ....yield SomeClass(value)

    I don't consider this any significant improvement over the while loop version, but I think it would help prevent misunderstandings similar to Kurt's.

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  3. The index is 1-based. It's the column number from reading Excel spreadsheets.

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  7. Oh, I see. The data is the index and value from a column, and the code is to fill in the "missing" numbers with Nones?

    A defaultdict may be perfect for this. Since source is already in the form of a series of a list of (index, value) tuples, we can just pass this straight to the constructor.

    >>> source = [ (1, 'a'), (5, 'b') ]
    >>> import collections
    >>> data = collections.defaultdict(lambda: None, source)

    (add a list comprehension to call SomeClass constructor: collections.defaultdict(lambda: None, [(k, SomeClass(v)) for k,v in source])

    Then your code can just treat data as if it were a list for indexing.

    >>> data[1]
    'a'
    >>> data[2]
    >>> data[3]
    >>> data[4]
    >>> data[5]
    'b'

    If you want to make it into a real list (for slicing, etc) you can do this with a simple comprehension:

    >>> datalist = [data[a] for a in xrange(max(data.keys())+1)]
    >>> datalist
    [None, 'a', None, None, None, 'b']

    You could also replace this with a generator expression if you wanted to save memory I guess, but you may as well leave it as a defaultdict in that case.

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