For various reasons I need to cache about 8GB of data from disk into core on application startup.
Building this cache takes nearly 2 hours on modern hardware. I am surprised to discover that the bottleneck here is CPU. The reason this is surprising is because I expect something like this to be very fast: #!python import array a = array.array('L') f = open('/dev/zero','r') while True: a.fromstring(f.read(8)) Profiling this application shows all of the time is spent inside a.fromstring. Little difference if I use list instead of array. Is there anything I could tell the Python runtime to help it run this pathologically slanted case faster?
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