Has anyone ever had code in Python, that turned out not to perform fast enough?
I mean, you were forced to choose another language because of it?
We are investigating using Python for a couple of larger projects, and my feeling is that in most cases, Python is plenty fast enough for most scenarios (compared to say, Java) because it relies on optimized C routines.
I wanted to see if people had instances where they started out in Python, but ended up having to go with something else because of performance.
Thanks.
A month ago i had this little program written in Python (for work) that analyzes logs.
When then number of log files grew, the program begun to be very slow and i thought i could rewrite it in Java.
I was very interesting. It took a whole day to migrate the same algorithm from Python to Java. At the end of the day, a few benchmark trials showed me clearly that the Java program was some 20% / 25% slower than its Python counterpart. It was a surprise to me.
Writing for the second time the algorithm also showed me that some optimization was possible. So in two hours i completely rewrote the whole thing in Python and it was some 40% faster than the original Python implementation (hence orders of time faster than the Java version I had).
So:

Python is a slow language but still it can be faster, for certain tasks, that other supposedly faster languages
If you have to spend time writing something in a language whose execution is faster but whose development time is slower (most languages), consider using the same time to analyze the problem, search for libraries, profile and then write better Python code.
Python Performance - have you ever had to rewrite in something else?