CEIS 420 Chapter 4: Good Performance is Rewarding!

Big-O Notation

A form of asymptomatic notation that belongs to a family of notations called the Bachmann-Landau notation or asymptomatic notation and describes how the rate of growth of a function scales with respect to some input size.

Bloom Filter

A sparse data structure that allows testing for the presence of an element in the set.

ChainMap

A container in the collections module that is a class with a dictionary-like interface for keeping track of multiple mappings

Counter

A container in the collections module that is a sub-class of dict for keeping count and statistics of hashable types

defaultdict

A container in the collections module that is a sub-class of dict and provides factory functions for types to provide missing values

Deque

A container in the collections module that is an alternative to a list container supporting fast insertions and pops at either end

Deterministic Profiling

A type of profiling that monitors all function calls, function returns, and exception events and determines precise timings for intervals between these events

Dictionary

A data structure in Python that is used to store data values in key-value pairs and the collection of these data values is unordered, changeable, and without any duplicates

Line Profiler

A profiler application developed for performing line-by-line profiling of Python applications

List

A data structure in Python that is used to store multiple items in a single variable

Memory Profiler

A profiler application that profiles lines of code by memory consumption

namedtuple

A container in the collections module that is a type for creating tuple-like classes with named fields

objgraph

A Python object visualization tool that makes use of the graphviz package to draw object reference graphs

OrderedDict

A container in the collections module that is a sub-class of dict and remembers the order of insertion of keys

Performance

The degree to which a system is able to meet its throughput and /or latency requirements in terms of the number of transactions per second or time taken for a single transaction

Pympler

A tool that can be used to monitor and measure the memory usage of objects in a Python application

Set

A data structure in Python that is a collection of data values that are unordered and unindexed

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

An approach that defines the steps involved in the development of software at each phase

Software Performance Engineering (SPE)

A systematic and quantitative approach to construct software systems that meet performance objectives

Statistical Profiling

A type of profiling that randomly samples an instruction pointer and deduces where time is being spent, but this may not be very accurate

timeit

A module in the Python standard library that allows the programmer to measure the time taken to execute small code snippets

Tuple

A data structure in Python that is an immutable version of a list