[Python-Dev] When do sets shrink? (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Thu Dec 29 06:03:50 CET 2005

Noam Raphael <noamraph at gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/29/05, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at verizon.net> wrote: > What could be done is to add a test for excess dummy entries and trigger > a periodic resize operation. That would make the memory available for > other parts of the currently running script and possibly available for > the O/S. > > The downside is slowing down a fine-grained operation like pop(). For > dictionaries, this wasn't considered worth it. For sets, I made the > same design decision. It wasn't an accident. I don't plan on changing > that decision unless we find a body of real world code that would be > better-off with more frequent re-sizing. The computer scientist in me prefers O() terms over changes in a constant factor, but that's only me. Perhaps a note about it should be added to the documentation, though?

The computer scientist in me agrees with you, but the practical application developer in me argues that every microsecond adds up.

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