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.)
Even though _json is available, I've noticed json decoding is very slow on CPython 2.6.6. I haven't compared with other implementations, but I've switched to string manipulation when inside performance-critical loops.
Python 2.6 JSON decoding performance