⚡️ Speed up function pivot_table by 3,237%
#238
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📄 3,237% (32.37x) speedup for
pivot_tableinsrc/data_processing/transformations.py⏱️ Runtime :
206 milliseconds→6.18 milliseconds(best of93runs)📝 Explanation and details
The optimized code achieves a 32x speedup by eliminating the primary bottleneck: repeated
df.iloc[i]calls within the loop. In the original implementation, eachdf.iloc[i]triggers pandas overhead to extract a single row as a Series, which is extremely expensive when repeated thousands of times (accounting for ~70% of runtime in the line profiler).Key optimizations:
Vectorized data extraction: The optimization pre-extracts entire columns as NumPy arrays using
df[column].valuesbefore the loop. This converts pandas Series to raw NumPy arrays, which have minimal access overhead.Direct array iteration with
zip(): Instead offor i in range(len(df))followed bydf.iloc[i], the code useszip(index_data, column_data, value_data)to iterate directly over array values. This eliminates per-row pandas indexing overhead entirely.Simplified dictionary operations with
setdefault(): The nested dictionary initialization is streamlined usingsetdefault(), which combines the existence check and default assignment into a single operation, reducing redundant dictionary lookups.Performance characteristics:
Small DataFrames (1-5 rows): The optimization shows marginal improvement or slight regression (~20-50μs vs ~40-100μs) because the upfront cost of extracting NumPy arrays dominates when there are few rows to process.
Large DataFrames (1000+ rows): The optimization excels dramatically, showing 50-80x speedups (e.g., 14.5ms → 200μs). The fixed overhead of array extraction (~38ms total across three columns based on line profiler) is amortized over many rows, while eliminating the quadratic-like cost of repeated
.iloc[]calls.All aggregation functions (mean, sum, count) benefit equally since the bottleneck was in the grouping phase, not the aggregation phase.
Impact considerations:
The function processes DataFrames to create pivot table-like aggregations. If this function is called in data processing pipelines or repeated analytics workflows with moderately-sized DataFrames (hundreds to thousands of rows), the optimization will significantly reduce processing time. The speedup scales linearly with DataFrame size, making it particularly valuable for batch processing or real-time analytics on non-trivial datasets.
✅ Correctness verification report:
🌀 Click to see Generated Regression Tests
To edit these changes
git checkout codeflash/optimize-pivot_table-mjsckj3oand push.