Ever wonder which is the fastest way to concatenate strings in Python?

2007-05-06 22:02:19 -08:00

This is a response to Ever wonder which is the fastest way to concatenate strings in Ruby?.

I tested using Python 2.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.9 on my four-core Mac Pro. Here are the results:

Method Time (seconds per million iterations)
+ 0.308359861374
str.join(list) 0.53214097023
str.join(tuple) 0.48233294487
% 0.515310049057

That’s quite a surprise—the usual advice is to avoid the + operator because it is inefficient. But here we see that it wins quite handily. Google revealed Chris Siebenmann’s explanation: Python 2.4 fixed the + operator to be much more efficient by only allocating one string instead of n-1 strings.

So, clearly, the old advice no longer applies. Go forth and use +.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, here’s the code. (The times shown above are using the re-create-the-string-every-time version of the code, for comparison’s sake. Not doing that only saves about 1100 second on each test-case.)

3 Responses to “Ever wonder which is the fastest way to concatenate strings in Python?”

  1. huwr Says:

    That’s cool. Here are the results from my 2.0GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro:

    +: 0.512433052063
    str.join(list): 0.9431848526
    str.join(tuple): 0.859102964401
    %: 0.936084985733
    –Alternate versions that don’t re-create the string every time–
    +: 0.50304889679
    str.join(list): 0.887317895889
    str.join(tuple): 0.794829130173
    %: 0.89204788208

  2. David Smith Says:

    Looking at Chris’s explanation, I’m not so sure that this optimization is quite the panacea your benchmark would imply it is…

    “Here’s the summary: counting on this optimization is unwise, as it turns out to depend on low-level details of system memory allocation that can vary from system to system and workload to workload. Also, this is only for plain (byte) strings, not for Unicode strings; as of Python 2.4.2, Unicode string concatenation remains un-optimized.”

    Perhaps we could get a new set of benchmark timings with unicode strings?

  3. Peter Hosey Says:

    David: Here you go. The % operator still wins with Unicode strings.

    WRT assuming the presence of the + optimization: I think it makes less sense to assume that % is faster. + is the concatenation operator, so it’s reasonable to assume that that’s the best way to concatenate; until 2.4, that wasn’t true, but now it is (for plain strings).

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