cqdm

A drop-in replacement for the popular tqdm library, accelerated with C bindings.

Usage

Install with pip install cqdm.

Replace usages of tqdm.tqdm with cqdm.cqdm. This can be done succinctly by changing your import statement:

# was: from tqdm import tqdm
from cqdm import cqdm as tqdm

Performance

This library has about 1/5 the overhead of standard tqdm:

This graph was generated by running performance.py.

Impact

There are over 40 million monthly downloads of tqdm. Let's assume there are 40 million instances of tqdm running every day, each performing 100,000 iterations. This totals 92,000 seconds or 9.58 days of overhead, per day. Using a reasonable price for CPU time on AWS, this equates to around $10 of compute, per day globally.

Switching to cqdm would reduce this overhead by 4/5. That means, if everyone switched to using cqdm, we could save $8 in CPU time per day, globally.

Of course, this ignores the increased time for installs, compilation, etc., which is nearly an order of magnitude greater than the time saved...

Developing

To develop cqdm locally:

1. Create a fresh venv
2. Install tqdm with pip install tqdm
3. Build the C-extension with python setup.py build
4. Install it with python setup.py install
5. Run the demo with python demo/demo.py

Performance

To generate performance graphs:

1. Install matplotlib with python3 -m pip install matplotlib
2. If on linux, then it might be necessary to install a gui backend for plt.show() to function. Do so with sudo apt-get install python3-tk
3. Generate the performance graph with python demo/performance.py