Shane O'Connor, 17.03.2011 01:32:
In particular, I'm using Python 2.4.3 on a web server which needs to run as fast as possible using as little memory as possible (no surprises there!).
Note that a web application involves many things outside of your own code that seriously impact the performance and/or resource requirements. Database access can be slow, excessively dynamic page generation and template engines can become a bottleneck, badly configured caching can eat your RAM and slow down your response times.
It seems very unlikely to me that the performance of loop iteration will make a substantial difference for you.
I'm aware that there are more significant optimizations than the above and I will profile the code rather than prematurely optimize loops at the sake of readability/errors but I'm still curious about the answer.
You shouldn't be. Optimising at that level is clearly the wrong place to start with.
That touches on a really nice feature of Python. It's a language that allows you to focus strongly on your desired functionality instead of thinking about questionable micro optimisations all over the place. Optimisation is something that you should start to apply when your test suite is large enough to catch the bugs you introduce by doing it.
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