Hello, Does print function make the code run slower? I'm storing the n

Ramesh

Hello, Does print function make the code run slower? I'm storing the needed results in an external text file, but I would like to know if the print function will make it run slower or not? Thanks in advance :)

6 Replies

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Ganesan C5y ago
Yes. Every task in program took some amount of time(milliseconds). But if you are adding lot of print statements then obviously it tooks time and it affects speed of the program.
Sagar Lad5y ago
True.

target = open('target.txt', 'w') for item in xrange(4000000): target.write(str(item)+'\n') print item
Timing it:

[gp@imdev1 /tmp]$ time python large.py real 1m51.690s user 0m10.531s sys 0m6.129s gp@imdev1 /tmp]$ ls -lah target.txt -rw-rw-r--. 1 gp gp 30M Nov 8 16:06 target.txt
Now running the same with "print" commented out:

gp@imdev1 /tmp]$ time python large.py real 0m2.584s user 0m2.536s sys 0m0.040s
Rajanikant Hawaldar5y ago
it absolutely will slow it down, so only print when something remarkable happens (like +1% completion)
Ramesh5y ago
actually i am expecting like ~10,000 per second .. so i think it will slow it down
Rajanikant Hawaldar5y ago
printing to the terminal can be a bottleneck for heavy processing, but you won't notice a difference unless you're printing 1000s of times a second
Sachin Singh5y ago
obviously printing something will be slower, if you are printing line by line huge amount of data then there will be a dramatic decrease in performance.