Speed Check

Published May 10, 2020


I'm trying to record a stream of string data coming from a Teensy microcontroller over USB Serial. I chose a high baud rate so I can transfer and save the data quickly, but I don't want to drop any elements from the stream while I'm trying to write it down. So I wrote a little test script to see which method is fastest.

Results

For each method, I wrote the string "yaga," 10,000 times.

Setting elements of a prealloc'd Python list works the fastest. I thought writing to a file would take less time, but it's actually around 3x slower. Python append works pretty fast too, but has the overhead of a list of changing size

Link to code

projectlog speedcheck