Develop Reference

How do I improve the speed of this parser using python?

I am currently parsing historic delay data from a public transport network in Sweden. I have ~5700 files (one from every 15 seconds) from the 27th of January containing momentary delay data for vehicles on active trips in the network. It's, unfortunately, a lot of overhead / duplicate data, so I want to parse out the relevant stuff to do visualizations on it.
However, when I try to parse and filter out the relevant delay data on a trip level using the script below it performs really slow. It has been running for over 1,5 hours now (on my 2019 Macbook Pro 15') and isn't finished yet.
How can I optimize / improve this python parser?
Or should I reduce the number of files, and i.e. the frequency of the data collection, for this task?
Thank you so much in advance. 💗
from google.transit import gtfs_realtime_pb2
import gzip
import os
import datetime
import csv
import numpy as np
directory = '../data/tripu/27/'
datapoints = np.zeros((0,3), int)
read_trips = set()
# Loop through all files in directory
for filename in os.listdir(directory)[::3]:
try:
# Uncompress and parse protobuff-file using gtfs_realtime_pb2
with gzip.open(directory + filename, 'rb') as file:
response = file.read()
feed = gtfs_realtime_pb2.FeedMessage()
feed.ParseFromString(response)
print("Filename: " + filename, "Total entities: " + str(len(feed.entity)))
for trip in feed.entity:
if trip.trip_update.trip.trip_id not in read_trips:
try:
if len(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update) == len(stopsOnTrip[trip.trip_update.trip.trip_id]):
print("\t","Adding delays for",len(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update),"stops, on trip_id",trip.trip_update.trip.trip_id)
for i, stop_time_update in enumerate(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[:-1]):
# Store the delay data point (arrival difference of two ascending nodes)
delay = int(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[i+1].arrival.delay-trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[i].arrival.delay)
# Store contextual metadata (timestamp and edgeID) for the unique delay data point
ts = int(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[i+1].arrival.time)
key = int(str(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[i].stop_id) + str(trip.trip_update.stop_time_update[i+1].stop_id))
# Append data to numpy array
datapoints = np.append(datapoints, np.array([[key,ts,delay]]), axis=0)
read_trips.add(trip.trip_update.trip.trip_id)
except KeyError:
continue
else:
continue
except OSError:
continue

I suspect the problem here is repeatedly calling np.append to add a new row to a numpy array. Because the size of a numpy array is fixed when it is created, np.append() must create a new array, which means that it has to copy the previous array. On each loop, the array is bigger and so all these copies add a quadratic factor to your execution time. This becomes significant when the array is quite big (which apparently it is in your application).
As an alternative, you could just create an ordinary Python list of tuples, and then if necessary convert that to a complete numpy array at the end.
That is (only the modified lines):
datapoints = []
# ...
datapoints.append((key,ts,delay))
# ...
npdata = np.array(datapoints, dtype=int)

I still think the parse routine is your bottleneck (even if it did come from Google), but all those '.'s were killing me! (And they do slow down performance somewhat.) Also, I converted your i, i+1 iterating to using two iterators zipping through the list of updates, this is a little more advanced style of working through a list. Plus the cur/next_update names helped me keep straight when you wanted to reference one vs. the other. Finally, I remove the trailing "else: continue", since you are at the end of the for loop anyway.
for trip in feed.entity:
this_trip_update = trip.trip_update
this_trip_id = this_trip_update.trip.trip_id
if this_trip_id not in read_trips:
try:
if len(this_trip_update.stop_time_update) == len(stopsOnTrip[this_trip_id]):
print("\t", "Adding delays for", len(this_trip_update.stop_time_update), "stops, on trip_id",
this_trip_id)
# create two iterators to walk through the list of updates
cur_updates = iter(this_trip_update.stop_time_update)
nxt_updates = iter(this_trip_update.stop_time_update)
# advance the nxt_updates iter so it is one ahead of cur_updates
next(nxt_updates)
for cur_update, next_update in zip(cur_updates, nxt_updates):
# Store the delay data point (arrival difference of two ascending nodes)
delay = int(nxt_update.arrival.delay - cur_update.arrival.delay)
# Store contextual metadata (timestamp and edgeID) for the unique delay data point
ts = int(next_update.arrival.time)
key = "{}/{}".format(cur_update.stop_id, next_update.stop_id)
# Append data to numpy array
datapoints = np.append(datapoints, np.array([[key, ts, delay]]), axis=0)
read_trips.add(this_trip_id)
except KeyError:
continue
This code should be equivalent to what you posted, and I don't really expect major performance gains either, but perhaps this will be more maintainable when you come back to look at it in 6 months.
(This probably is more appropriate for CodeReview, but I hardly ever go there.)

Python: numpy.corrcoef Memory Error

I was trying to calculate the correlation between a large set of data read from a text. For extremely large data set the program give a memory error. Can anyone please tell me how to correct this problem. Thanks
The following is my code:
enter code here
import numpy
from numpy import *
from array import *
from decimal import *
import sys
Threshold = 0.8;
TopMostData = 10;
FileName = sys.argv[1]
File = open(FileName,'r')
SignalData = numpy.empty((1, 128));
SignalData[:][:] = 0;
for line in File:
TempLine = line.split();
TempInt = [float(i) for i in TempLine]
SignalData = vstack((SignalData,TempInt))
del TempLine;
del TempInt;
File.close();
TempData = SignalData;
SignalData = SignalData[1:,:]
SignalData = SignalData[:,65:128]
print "File Read | Data Stored" + " | Total Lines: " + str(len(SignalData))
CorrelationData = numpy.corrcoef(SignalData)
The following is the error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Corelation.py", line 36, in <module>
CorrelationData = numpy.corrcoef(SignalData)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/lib/function_base.py", line 1824, in corrcoef
return c/sqrt(multiply.outer(d, d))
MemoryError

You run out of memory as the comments show. If that happens because you are using 32-bit Python, even the method below will fail. But for the 64-bit Python and not-so-much-RAM situation we can do a lot as calculating the correlations is easily done piecewise, as you only need two lines in the memory simultaneously.
So, you may split your input into, say, 1000 row chunks, and then the resulting 1000 x 1000 matrices are easy to keep in memory. Then you can assemble your result into the big output matrix which is not necessarily in the RAM. I recommend this approach even if you have a lot of RAM, because this is much more memory-friendly. Correlation coefficient calculation is not an operation where fast random accesses would help a lot if the input can be kept in RAM.
Unfortunately, the numpy.corrcoef does not do this automatically, and we'll have to roll our own correlation coefficient calculation. Fortunately, that is not as hard as it sounds.
Something along these lines:
import numpy as np
# number of rows in one chunk
SPLITROWS = 1000
# the big table, which is usually bigger
bigdata = numpy.random.random((27000, 128))
numrows = bigdata.shape[0]
# subtract means form the input data
bigdata -= np.mean(bigdata, axis=1)[:,None]
# normalize the data
bigdata /= np.sqrt(np.sum(bigdata*bigdata, axis=1))[:,None]
# reserve the resulting table onto HDD
res = np.memmap("/tmp/mydata.dat", 'float64', mode='w+', shape=(numrows, numrows))
for r in range(0, numrows, SPLITROWS):
for c in range(0, numrows, SPLITROWS):
r1 = r + SPLITROWS
c1 = c + SPLITROWS
chunk1 = bigdata[r:r1]
chunk2 = bigdata[c:c1]
res[r:r1, c:c1] = np.dot(chunk1, chunk2.T)
Some notes:
the code above is tested above np.corrcoef(bigdata)
if you have complex values, you'll need to create a complex output array res and take the complex conjugate of chunk2.T
the code garbles bigdata to maintain performance and minimize memory use; if you need to preserve it, make a copy
The above code takes about 85 s to run on my machine, but the data will mostly fit in RAM, and I have a SSD disk. The algorithm is coded in such order to avoid too random access into the HDD, i.e. the access is reasonably sequential. In comparison, the non-memmapped standard version is not significantly faster even if you have a lot of memory. (Actually, it took a lot more time in my case, but I suspect I ran out of my 16 GiB and then there was a lot of swapping going on.)
You can make the actual calculations faster by omitting half of the matrix, because res.T == res. In practice, you can omit all blocks where c > r and then mirror them later on. On the other hand, the performance is most likely limited by the HDD preformance, so other optimizations do not necessarily bring much more speed.
Of course, this approach is easy to make parallel, as the chunk calculations are completely independent. Also the memmapped array can be shared between threads rather easily.

Importing big tecplot block files in python as fast as possible

I want to import in python some ascii file ( from tecplot, software for cfd post processing).
Rules for those files are (at least, for those that I need to import):
The file is divided in several section
Each section has two lines as header like:
VARIABLES = "x" "y" "z" "ro" "rovx" "rovy" "rovz" "roE" "M" "p" "Pi" "tsta" "tgen"
ZONE T="Window(s) : E_W_Block0002_ALL", I=29, J=17, K=25, F=BLOCK
Each section has a set of variable given by the first line. When a section ends, a new section starts with two similar lines.
For each variable there are I*J*K values.
Each variable is a continous block of values.
There are a fixed number of values per row (6).
When a variable ends, the next one starts in a new line.
Variables are "IJK ordered data".The I-index varies the fastest; the J-index the next fastest; the K-index the slowest. The I-index should be the inner loop, the K-index shoould be the outer loop, and the J-index the loop in between.
Here is an example of data:
VARIABLES = "x" "y" "z" "ro" "rovx" "rovy" "rovz" "roE" "M" "p" "Pi" "tsta" "tgen"
ZONE T="Window(s) : E_W_Block0002_ALL", I=29, J=17, K=25, F=BLOCK
-3.9999999E+00 -3.3327306E+00 -2.7760824E+00 -2.3117116E+00 -1.9243209E+00 -1.6011492E+00
[...]
0.0000000E+00 #fin first variable
-4.3532482E-02 -4.3584235E-02 -4.3627592E-02 -4.3663762E-02 -4.3693815E-02 -4.3718831E-02 #second variable, 'y'
[...]
1.0738781E-01 #end of second variable
[...]
[...]
VARIABLES = "x" "y" "z" "ro" "rovx" "rovy" "rovz" "roE" "M" "p" "Pi" "tsta" "tgen" #next zone
ZONE T="Window(s) : E_W_Block0003_ALL", I=17, J=17, K=25, F=BLOCK
I am quite new at python and I have written a code to import the data to a dictionary, writing the variables as 3D numpy.array . Those files could be very big, (up to Gb). How can I make this code faster? (or more generally, how can I import such files as fast as possible)?
import re
from numpy import zeros, array, prod
def vectorr(I, J, K):
"""function"""
vect = []
for k in range(0, K):
for j in range(0, J):
for i in range(0, I):
vect.append([i, j, k])
return vect
a = open('E:\u.dat')
filelist = a.readlines()
NumberCol = 6
count = 0
data = dict()
leng = len(filelist)
countzone = 0
while count < leng:
strVARIABLES = re.findall('VARIABLES', filelist[count])
variables = re.findall(r'"(.*?)"', filelist[count])
countzone = countzone+1
data[countzone] = {key:[] for key in variables}
count = count+1
strI = re.findall('I=....', filelist[count])
strI = re.findall('\d+', strI[0])
I = int(strI[0])
##
strJ = re.findall('J=....', filelist[count])
strJ = re.findall('\d+', strJ[0])
J = int(strJ[0])
##
strK = re.findall('K=....', filelist[count])
strK = re.findall('\d+', strK[0])
K = int(strK[0])
data[countzone]['indmax'] = array([I, J, K])
pr = prod(data[countzone]['indmax'])
lin = pr // NumberCol
if pr%NumberCol != 0:
lin = lin+1
vect = vectorr(I, J, K)
for key in variables:
init = zeros((I, J, K))
for ii in range(0, lin):
count = count+1
temp = map(float, filelist[count].split())
for iii in range(0, len(temp)):
init.itemset(tuple(vect[ii*6+iii]), temp[iii])
data[countzone][key] = init
count = count+1
Ps. In python, no cython or other languages

Converting a large bunch of strings to numbers is always going to be a little slow, but assuming the triple-nested for-loop is the bottleneck here maybe changing it to the following gives you a sufficient speedup:
# add this line to your imports
from numpy import fromstring
# replace the nested for-loop with:
count += 1
for key in variables:
str_vector = ' '.join(filelist[count:count+lin])
ar = fromstring(str_vector, sep=' ')
ar = ar.reshape((I, J, K), order='F')
data[countzone][key] = ar
count += lin
Unfortunately at the moment I only have access to my smartphone (no pc) so I can't test how fast this is or even if it works correctly or at all!
Update
Finally I got around to doing some testing:
My code contained a small error, but it does seem to work correctly now.
The code with the proposed changes runs about 4 times faster than the original
Your code spends most of its time on ndarray.itemset and probably loop overhead and float conversion. Unfortunately cProfile doesn't show this in much detail..
The improved code spends about 70% of time in numpy.fromstring, which, in my view, indicates that this method is reasonably fast for what you can achieve with Python / NumPy.
Update 2
Of course even better would be to iterate over the file instead of loading everything all at once. In this case this is slightly faster (I tried it) and significantly reduces memory use. You could also try to use multiple CPU cores to do the loading and conversion to floats, but then it becomes difficult to have all the data under one variable. Finally a word of warning: the fromstring method that I used scales rather bad with the length of the string. E.g. from a certain string length it becomes more efficient to use something like np.fromiter(itertools.imap(float, str_vector.split()), dtype=float).

If you use regular expressions here, there's two things that I would change:
Compile REs which are used more often (which applies to all REs in your example, I guess). Do regex=re.compile("<pattern>") on them, and use the resulting object with match=regex.match(), as described in the Python documentation.
For the I, J, K REs, consider reducing two REs to one, using the grouping feature (also described above), by searching for a pattern of the form "I=(\d+)", and grabbing the part matched inside the parentheses using regex.group(1). Taking this further, you can define a single regex to capture all three variables in one step.
At least for starting the sections, REs seem a bit overkill: There's no variation in the string you need to look for, and string.find() is sufficient and probably faster in that case.
EDIT: I just saw you use grouping already for the variables...

Reading complex binary file in python

I am rather new to python programming so please be a big simple with your answer.
I have a .raw file which is 2b/2b complex short int format. Its actually a 2-D raster file. I want to read and seperate both real and complex parts. Lets say the raster is [MxN] size.
Please let me know if question is not clear.
Cheers
N

You could do it with the struct module. Here's a simple example based on the file formatting information you mentioned in a comment:
import struct
def read_complex_array(filename, M, N):
row_fmt = '={}h'.format(N) # "=" prefix means integers in native byte-order
row_len = struct.calcsize(row_fmt)
result = []
with open(filename, "rb" ) as input:
for col in xrange(M):
reals = struct.unpack(row_fmt, input.read(row_len))
imags = struct.unpack(row_fmt, input.read(row_len))
cmplx = [complex(r,i) for r,i in zip(reals, imags)]
result.append(cmplx)
return result
This will return a list of complex-number lists, as can be seen in this output from a trivial test I ran:
[
[ 0.0+ 1.0j 1.0+ 2.0j 2.0+ 3.0j 3.0+ 4.0j],
[256.0+257.0j 257.0+258.0j 258.0+259.0j 259.0+260.0j],
[512.0+513.0j 513.0+514.0j 514.0+515.0j 515.0+516.0j]
]
Both the real and imaginary parts of complex numbers in Python are usually represented as a pair of machine-level double precision floating point numbers.
You could also use the array module. Here's the same thing using it:
import array
def read_complex_array2(filename, M, N):
result = []
with open(filename, "rb" ) as input:
for col in xrange(M):
reals = array.array('h')
reals.fromfile(input, N)
# reals.byteswap() # if necessary
imags = array.array('h')
imags.fromfile(input, N)
# imags.byteswap() # if necessary
cmplx = [complex(r,i) for r,i in zip(reals, imags)]
result.append(cmplx)
return result
As you can see, they're very similar, so it's not clear there's a big advantage to using one over the other. I suspect the array based version might be faster, but that would have to be determined by actually timing it with some real data to be able to say with any certainty.

Take a look at Hachoir library. It's designed for this purposes, and does it's work really good.

Random List of millions of elements in Python Efficiently

I have read this answer potentially as the best way to randomize a list of strings in Python. I'm just wondering then if that's the most efficient way to do it because I have a list of about 30 million elements via the following code:
import json
from sets import Set
from random import shuffle
a = []
for i in range(0,193):
json_data = open("C:/Twitter/user/user_" + str(i) + ".json")
data = json.load(json_data)
for j in range(0,len(data)):
a.append(data[j]['su'])
new = list(Set(a))
print "Cleaned length is: " + str(len(new))
## Take Cleaned List and Randomize it for Analysis
shuffle(new)
If there is a more efficient way to do it, I'd greatly appreciate any advice on how to do it.
Thanks,

A couple of possible suggestions:
import json
from random import shuffle
a = set()
for i in range(193):
with open("C:/Twitter/user/user_{0}.json".format(i)) as json_data:
data = json.load(json_data)
a.update(d['su'] for d in data)
print("Cleaned length is {0}".format(len(a)))
# Take Cleaned List and Randomize it for Analysis
new = list(a)
shuffle(new)
.
the only way to know if this is faster is to profile it!
do you prefer sets.Set to the built-in set() for a reason?
I have introduced a with clause (preferred way of opening files, as it guarantees they get closed)
it did not appear that you were doing anything with 'a' as a list except converting it to a set; why not make it a set from the start?
rather than iterate on an index, then do a lookup on the index, I just iterate on the data items...
which makes it easily rewriteable as a generator expression

If you think you're going to do shuffle, you're probably better off using the solution from this file. For realz.
randomly mix lines of 3 million-line file
Basically the shuffle algorithm has a very low period (meaning it can't hit all the possible combinations of 3 million files, let alone 30 million). If you can load the data in memory then your best bet is as they say. Basically assign a random number to each line and sort that badboy.
See this thread. And here, I did it for you so you didn't mess anything up (that's a joke),
import json
import random
from operator import itemgetter
a = set()
for i in range(0,193):
json_data = open("C:/Twitter/user/user_" + str(i) + ".json")
data = json.load(json_data)
a.update(d['su'] for d in data)
print "Cleaned length is: " + str(len(new))
new = [(random.random(), el) for el in a]
new.sort()
new = map(itemgetter(1), new)

I don't know if it will be any faster but you could try numpy's shuffle.