Bernard Lebel wrote: > Bruno: good question. We're talking about text files that can have > 300,000 lines, if not more. Currently, the way I have coded the file > writing, every line calls for a write() to the file object, which in > turns write to the text file. The file is on the network.
assuming an average line length of 30 (for program code) to 60-80 characters (for human text), that's no more than 12-24 megabytes of data. few modern computers should have any trouble holding that in memory. just build the list in memory, and use a single "writelines" call to write everything to disk. (alternatively, try write("".join(data)). that'll use twice as much memory, but may be a little bit faster) > This is taking a long time, and I'm looking for ways to speed up this > process. I though that keeping the list in memory and dropping to the > file at the very end could be a possible approach. chances are that you're already I/O bound, though... </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list