performance - Reading Huge File in Python

Question

I have a 384MB text file with 50 million lines. Each line contains 2 space-separated integers: a key and a value. The file is sorted by key. I need an efficient way of looking up the values of a list of about 200 keys in Python.

My current approach is included below. It takes 30 seconds. There must be more efficient Python foo to get this down to a reasonable efficiency of a couple of seconds at most.

# list contains a sorted list of the keys we need to lookup
# there is a sentinel at the end of list to simplify the code
# we use pointer to iterate through the list of keys
for line in fin:
  line = map(int, line.split())
  while line[0] == list[pointer].key:
    list[pointer].value = line[1]
    pointer += 1
  while line[0] > list[pointer].key:
    pointer += 1
  if pointer >= len(list) - 1:
    break # end of list; -1 is due to sentinel

Coded binary search + seek solution (thanks kigurai!):

entries = 24935502 # number of entries
width   = 18       # fixed width of an entry in the file padded with spaces
                   # at the end of each line
for i, search in enumerate(list): # list contains the list of search keys
  left, right = 0, entries-1 
  key = None
  while key != search and left <= right:
    mid = (left + right) / 2
    fin.seek(mid * width)
    key, value = map(int, fin.readline().split())
    if search > key:
      left = mid + 1
    else:
      right = mid - 1
  if key != search:
    value = None # for when search key is not found
  search.result = value # store the result of the search

Answer 1

If you only need 200 of 50 million lines, then reading all of it into memory is a waste. I would sort the list of search keys and then apply binary search to the file using seek() or something similar. This way you would not read the entire file to memory which I think should speed things up.