I’ve been looking at how I can improve the performance of an internal service written in Python. I was wondering if there is a way to speed things up without rewriting large part of the code or using another programming language to rewrite part of the code. Then I remember reading about Pyston (a faster and highly-compatible with Cpython from Dropbox) on HackerNews and this seems like an opportunity to try it out. I’ve integrated into the service, planning to run some benchmarks and hopefully I will have something to share another time!

As I read more about Pyston, I stumble upon one of the co-authors of Pyston, Kevin’s blog post: Python performance: it’s not just the interpreter. It is a good read and please go check it out. I didn’t understand that much of the “C” optimizations because my lack of knowledge with the langauge and the CPython internals. Still, I find it great because I learned a thing or two from the post.

I also tried running the Python examples on my laptop. See the github repo for the code content.

➜  str_bench git:(master) python --version
Python 3.9.6
➜  str_bench git:(master) time python str00.py 
python str00.py  5.17s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 5.185 total
➜  str_bench git:(master) time python str01.py
python str01.py  4.50s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 4.526 total
➜  str_bench git:(master) time python str02.py
python str02.py  4.74s user 0.41s system 99% cpu 5.155 total
➜  str_bench git:(master) time python str03.py 
python str03.py  4.90s user 0.47s system 99% cpu 5.380 total
➜  str_bench git:(master) time python str04.py
python str04.py  4.43s user 0.47s system 99% cpu 4.907 total

Starting from this, str00.py.

def main():
    for j in range(20):
        for i in range(1000000):
            str(i)
main()

to this,

def main():
    for j in range(20):
        list(map(str, range(1000000)))
main()

You can see the difference in the time.

Some takeaways

1. str() is slow because it’s not a function: it’s a type
2. referencing str in the very big loop can be expensive. optimizing by caching str into a variable s helps

s = str
for i in range(1000000):
    s(i)

3. moving the for loop out of Python and into C with map() can also speed up

for j in range(20):
    list(map(str, range(1000000)))

4. One of the comment suggested that f-strings are faster than normal str(). And they are!

➜  ~ python -m timeit "str(1)"
1000000 loops, best of 5: 210 nsec per loop
➜  ~ python -m timeit "f'{1}'"          
5000000 loops, best of 5: 91.7 nsec per loop

Need to find out more why f-strings are faster with dis module. # TODO

5. PyPy might be pretty fast as well. I gotta try it sometime. # TODO