On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:45:18 -0800, allenjo5 wrote:
> [ Warning: I'm new to Python. Don't know it at all really yet, but had
> to examine some 3rd party code because of performance problems with it.
> ]
>
> Here's a code snippet:
>
> i = 0
> while (i < 20):
> i = i + 1
You probably want to change that to:
for i in range(20):
If 20 is just a place-holder, and the real value is much bigger, change
the range() to xrange().
> (shellIn, shellOut) = os.popen4("/bin/sh -c ':'") # for testing, the
> spawned shell does nothing
> print 'next'
> # for line in shellOut:
> # print line
>
> On my system (AIX 5.1 if it matters, with Python 2.4.3), this simple
> loop spawning 20 subshells takes .75 sec. Ok, that's reasonable. Now,
> if I uncomment the two commented lines, which loop over the empty
> shellOut array, the progam now takes 11 secs. That slowdown seems
> very hard to believe. Why should it slow down so much?
What are you using to time the code?
Replacing print statements with "pass", I get these results:
>>> import timeit
>>>
>>> def test():
... i = 0
... while (i < 20):
... i = i + 1
... (shellIn, shellOut) = os.popen4("/bin/sh -c ':'")
... pass # print 'next'
... for line in shellOut:
... pass # print line
...
>>> timeit.Timer("test()", "from __main__ import test\nimport os").timeit(1)
0.49781703948974609
>>> timeit.Timer("test()", "from __main__ import test\nimport os").timeit(100)
54.894074201583862
About 0.5 second to open and dispose of 20 subshells, even with the "for
line in shellOut" loop.
I think you need some more fine-grained testing to determine whether the
slowdown is actually happening inside the "for line in shellOut" loop or
inside the while loop or when the while loop completes.
--
Steven.
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