Re: How to increase the speed of this program?

John Machin wrote:

Thanks, that's indeed faster than array(t, [v]*n) but what I had in
mind was something like an additional constructor:

array.filledarray(typecode, repeat_value, repeat_count)

which I speculate should be even faster. Looks like I'd better get a
copy of arraymodule.c and start fiddling.

Anyone who could use this? Suggestions on name? Argument order?

Functionality: same as array.array(typecode, [repeat_value]) *
repeat_count. So it would cope with array.filledarray('c', "foo", 10)

Why not just optimize array.__mul__? The difference is clearly in the
repeated memcpy() in arraymodule.c:683. Pseudo-unrolling the loop in
python demonstrates a speed up:

[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c',['\0'])*100000"
100 loops, best of 3: 3.14 msec per loop
[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c',['\0','\0','\0','\0'])*25000"
1000 loops, best of 3: 732 usec per loop
[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c','\0'*20)*5000"10000 loops, best of 3: 148 usec per loop

Which is quite close to your fromstring solution:

[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c').fromstring('\0'*100000)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 137 usec per loop

In fact, you can make it about 4x faster by balancing:

[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c','\0'*200)*500"
10000 loops, best of 3: 32.4 usec per loop

For the record:

[klaas@worbo ~]$ python -m timeit -s "from array import array"
"array('c','\0'*100000)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 140 usec per loop

-Mike

.

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