From: GOTO Kentaro <gotoken@...>
Date: 2002-09-24T02:47:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Speed up suggestions

At Mon, 23 Sep 2002 23:44:30 +0900,
Vincent Foley wrote:

> In my experience, Python is faster than Ruby.  I made a small script to
> help me do crossword puzzles.  The first thing I do, is open a
> dictionary file and put it in memory:
> 
> Ruby: _wordList = open('/home/vince/fr_dict.txt', 'r').read.split('\n')
> Python: _wordList = (open('/home/vince/fr_dict.txt', 'r').read()).split('\n')

I tried a benchmark test with ruby 1.6.7:

  require "benchmark"

  a, b = 0, 0

  Benchmark::bmbm do |x|
    x.report('\n'.inspect){a=open("/usr/share/dict/words").read.split('\n')}
    x.report("\n".inspect){b=open("/usr/share/dict/words").read.split("\n")}
  end

  p a.size
  p b.size

produces

  Rehearsal -----------------------------------------
  "\\n"   1.437500   0.046875   1.484375 (  1.740030)
  "\n"    0.664062   0.054688   0.718750 (  0.781546)
  -------------------------------- total: 2.203125sec

              user     system      total        real
  "\\n"   2.671875   0.132812   2.804688 (  3.055595)
  "\n"    0.281250   0.015625   0.296875 (  0.303488)
  235881
  235881

This shows split('\n') takes about *ten* times total time than split("\n"). 

-- Gotoken