Jon Smirl wrote: > Is there some way to tell a dictionary object that I am going to load 1M > objects into it and have it pre-allocate enought slots to hold all of the > entries?
Not according to the manual. Not according to the source [as at 2.4.3]. In any case, if there were a back-door undocumented arg for the dict constructor, somebody would have read the source and spread the news. > Thus avoiding many thousand memory allocations. What gives you the impression that "many thousand memory allocations" are involved? {My impression is that the dict would be resized about 11 times on its trip from size 8 to size 2M, and each resize would involve one allocation.] Do you have an application with a performance problem? If so, what makes you think inserting 1M items into a Python dict is contributing to the problem? Have you read the thread "Large Dictionaries" which started on/about 2006-05-15? In general, what is the background to your question? Cheers, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list