[Python-Dev] About dictionary lookup caching (original) (raw)

Andrea Griffini agriff at tin.it
Tue Dec 19 09:03:39 CET 2006

I'm experimenting with a patch for dictionary lookup caching, the main idea being avoiding the lookup of a constant (co_names) in a dictionary if the dictionary didn't change since last lookup.

Currently the cache is held in a structure that is parallel to co_names (the LOAD_GLOBAL opcode uses oparg to access the cache slot) and this is wasteful if there are co_names entries that are not used for global lookups.

Probably I could act at the code object creation time to sort names so that ones used by LOAD_GLOBAL are at the beginning of co_names but this would require inspecting and hacking the already generated opcode. Another case that would IMO be worth optimizing is the LOAD_ATTR lookup when it's done after a LOAD_GLOBAL (I suspect that in many cases the element being searched will be a module so caching would be simple to implement; for general objects things are way more complex and I see no simple solution for caching dictionary lookups).

My opinion is that it would be by far better to do this ordering of co_names at compile time but I've no idea where to look for trying to make such a change.

Can someone please point me in the right direction ?

Andrea

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