How to optimize operations on large (75,000 items) sets of booleans in Python?

There's this script called svnmerge.py that I'm trying to tweak and optimize a bit. I'm completely new to Python though, so it's not ea开发者_StackOverflow中文版sy.

The current problem seems to be related to a class called RevisionSet in the script. In essence what it does is create a large hashtable(?) of integer-keyed boolean values. In the worst case - one for each revision in our SVN repository, which is near 75,000 now.

After that it performs set operations on such huge arrays - addition, subtraction, intersection, and so forth. The implementation is the simplest O(n) implementation, which, naturally, gets pretty slow on such large sets. The whole data structure could be optimized because there are long spans of continuous values. For example, all keys from 1 to 74,000 might contain true. Also the script is written for Python 2.2, which is a pretty old version and we're using 2.6 anyway, so there could be something to gain there too.

I could try to cobble this together myself, but it would be difficult and take a lot of time - not to mention that it might be already implemented somewhere. Although I'd like the learning experience, the result is more important right now. What would you suggest I do?

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You could try doing it with numpy instead of plain python. I found it to be very fast for operations like these.

For example:

# Create 1000000 numbers between 0 and 1000, takes 21ms
x = numpy.random.randint(0, 1000, 1000000)

# Get all items that are larger than 500, takes 2.58ms
y = x > 500

# Add 10 to those items, takes 26.1ms
x[y] += 10

Since that's with a lot more rows, I think that 75000 should not be a problem either :)

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Here's a quick replacement for RevisionSet that makes it into a set. It should be much faster. I didn't fully test it, but it worked with all of the tests that I did. There are undoubtedly other ways to speed things up, but I think that this will really help because it actually harnesses the fast implementation of sets rather than doing loops in Python which the original code was doing in functions like __sub__ and __and__. The only problem with it is that the iterator isn't sorted. You might have to change a little bit of the code to account for this. I'm sure there are other ways to improve this, but hopefully it will give you a good start.

class RevisionSet(set):
    """
    A set of revisions, held in dictionary form for easy manipulation. If we
    were to rewrite this script for Python 2.3+, we would subclass this from
    set (or UserSet).  As this class does not include branch
    information, it's assumed that one instance will be used per
    branch.
    """
    def __init__(self, parm):
        """Constructs a RevisionSet from a string in property form, or from
        a dictionary whose keys are the revisions. Raises ValueError if the
        input string is invalid."""


        revision_range_split_re = re.compile('[-:]')

        if isinstance(parm, set):
            print "1"
            self.update(parm.copy())
        elif isinstance(parm, list):
            self.update(set(parm))
        else:
            parm = parm.strip()
            if parm:
                for R in parm.split(","):
                    rev_or_revs = re.split(revision_range_split_re, R)
                    if len(rev_or_revs) == 1:
                        self.add(int(rev_or_revs[0]))
                    elif len(rev_or_revs) == 2:
                        self.update(set(range(int(rev_or_revs[0]),
                                         int(rev_or_revs[1])+1)))
                    else:
                        raise ValueError, 'Ill formatted revision range: ' + R

    def sorted(self):
        return sorted(self)

    def normalized(self):
        """Returns a normalized version of the revision set, which is an
        ordered list of couples (start,end), with the minimum number of
        intervals."""
        revnums = sorted(self)
        revnums.reverse()
        ret = []
        while revnums:
            s = e = revnums.pop()
            while revnums and revnums[-1] in (e, e+1):
                e = revnums.pop()
            ret.append((s, e))
        return ret

    def __str__(self):
        """Convert the revision set to a string, using its normalized form."""
        L = []
        for s,e in self.normalized():
            if s == e:
                L.append(str(s))
            else:
                L.append(str(s) + "-" + str(e))
        return ",".join(L)

Addition: By the way, I compared doing unions, intersections and subtractions of the original RevisionSet and my RevisionSet above, and the above code is from 3x to 7x faster for those operations when operating on two RevisionSets that have 75000 elements. I know that other people are saying that numpy is the way to go, but if you aren't very experienced with Python, as your comment indicates, then you might not want to go that route because it will involve a lot more changes. I'd recommend trying my code, seeing if it works and if it does, then see if it is fast enough for you. If it isn't, then I would try profiling to see what needs to be improved. Only then would I consider using numpy (which is a great package that I use quite frequently).

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For example, all keys from 1 to 74,000 contain true

Why not work on a subset? Just 74001 to the end.

Pruning 74/75th of your data is far easier than trying to write an algorithm more clever than O(n).

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You should rewrite RevisionSet to have a set of revisions. I think the internal representation for a revision should be an integer and revision ranges should be created as needed.

There is no compelling reason to use code that supports python 2.3 and earlier.

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Just a thought. I used to do this kind of thing using run-coding in binary image manipulation. That is, store each set as a series of numbers: number of bits off, number of bits on, number of bits off, etc.

Then you can do all sorts of boolean operations on them as decorations on a simple merge algorithm.