Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Python benchmarks

Just for fun, I decided to run some Python benchmarks that test the lookup time differences between list, tuple, and dictionary types. The list performance seems to come out on top every time. This is confusing to me because I hear that tuples are supposed to be faster because they are immutable. Here is the test I used:
from timeit import Timer

test_data1=[1,2,3,4,5]
test_data2=(1,2,3,4,5)
test_data3={0:1,1:2,2:3,3:4,4:5}

def test1():
v=test_data1[2]

def test2():
v=test_data2[2]

def test3():
v=test_data3[2]

if __name__=='__main__':
print 'Test 1:', Timer("test1()", "from __main__ import test1").timeit()
print 'Test 2:', Timer("test2()", "from __main__ import test2").timeit()
print 'Test 3:', Timer("test3()", "from __main__ import test3").timeit()
I'm running this on a Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz machine. I wonder if my test is flawed.

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