Alex Rivera | Logout

Python 2.6 JSON decoding performance

Asked 2009-04-01T15:39:31.480
45

I'm using the json module in Python 2.6 to load and decode JSON files. However I'm currently getting slower than expected performance. I'm using a test case which is 6MB in size and json.loads() is taking 20 seconds.

I thought the json module had some native code to speed up the decoding?

How do I check if this is being used?

As a comparison, I downloaded and installed the python-cjson module, and cjson.decode() is taking 1 second for the same test case.

I'd rather use the JSON module provided with Python 2.6 so that users of my code aren't required to install additional modules.

(I'm developing on Mac OS X, but I getting a similar result on Windows XP.)

python json python-2.6
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Looking in my installation of Python 2.6.1 on windows, the json package loads the _json module, which is built into the runtime. C source for the json speedups module is here.

>>> import _json
>>> _json
<module '_json' (built-in)>
>>> print _json.__doc__
json speedups
>>> dir(_json)
['__doc__', '__name__', '__package__', 'encode_basestring_ascii', 'scanstring']
>>>
answered 2009-04-01T16:04:36.397

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