Posts tagged with “python” and “programming”


Sat 23 Apr

File reading performance in Python

There are a few ways to read a file in Python, some of which are outlined in this page about their relative performance. I am working on a project right now that involves reading large amounts of data from text files, so I repeated the analysis on Python 2.6.6, the version currently shipping with Ubuntu 10.10. I ran three implementations (below) against a file with 1 million lines.

My test script is available here, and the functions I tested are below. Here were my results:

ScriptTime (sec)Lines read per sec
fileread1:0.16955,899,280 lines/sec
fileread2:1.6387610,236 lines/sec
fileread3:0.12787,823,156 lines/sec
def fileread1():
    file = open("test.txt")
    while 1:
        line = file.readlines()
        if not line:
            break
        pass
    file.close()

def fileread2():
    for l in fileinput.input("test.txt"):
        pass

def fileread3():
    file = open("test.txt")
    for l in file:
        pass

Tue 29 Jun

python-mysqldb: execute() first

While working on implementing a schema-free, MySQL-backed data store (thanks, Bret Taylor!), I ran into a problem with using MySQLdb to access the database. I'll eventually post the code I wrote up on this site so others can see my example, but for now the following will suffice. When performing a SELECT, I would get the following error upon attempting to fetch my results.

Incorrect Python:
q = "SELECT body FROM entities WHERE id='%s'" % (entity_id)
self.conn.cursor().execute(q)
entity = self.conn.cursor().fetchone()

Error:
File "datastore.py", line 93, in get
entity = self.conn.cursor().fetchone()
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/MySQLdb/cursors.py", line 340, in fetchone
self._check_executed()
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/MySQLdb/cursors.py", line 70, in _check_executed
self.errorhandler(self, ProgrammingError, "execute() first")
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/MySQLdb/connections.py", line 35, in defaulterrorhandler
raise errorclass, errorvalue
_mysql_exceptions.ProgrammingError: execute() first

The issue was using two separate cursor objects. Here's the corrected code:
c = self.conn.cursor()
q = "SELECT body FROM entities WHERE id='%s'" % (entity_id)
c.execute(q)
entity = c.fetchone()