On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:49:06 -0800, Jonathan Gardner wrote: > On Jan 28, 3:52 pm, elsa <kerensael...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> >> I've got a problem with my program, in that the code just takes too >> long to run. Here's what I'm doing. If anyone has any tips, they'd be >> much appreciated! >> >> > First of all, don't play with large lists. Large lists have a tendency > to grow larger over time, until they get absurdly large. > > If you're dealing with a long list, work with it like you'd work with a > file. If you need random access, stick it in some form of database, such > as BDB or PostgreSQL. If you need an index, stick it in some form of DB. > Eventually, large lists end up like that anyway. Don't fool yourself > early on---prepare for the worst and solve the problems of tomorrow > today.
Talk about premature optimization. The OP probably has a few hundreds of thousands of items, millions at most, which is trivial on a modern PC. Your way of thinking is what has led to Firefox using a database to manage a few thousand bookmarks and cookies, which in turn leads to consistent data corruption problems. (I've been keeping note, and so far my installation of Firefox 3 has had database corruption at startup one time out of five.) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
