Best way to sort 1M records in Python

Question

I have a service that runs that takes a list of about 1,000,000 dictionaries and does the following

myHashTable = {}
myLists = { \'hits\':{}, \'misses\':{},          


        

Answer 1

Instead of trying to keep your list ordered, maybe you can get by with a heap queue. It lets you push any item, keeping the 'smallest' one at h[0], and popping this item (and 'bubbling' the next smallest) is an O(nlogn) operation.

so, just ask yourself:

• do i need the whole list ordered all the time? : use an ordered structure (like Zope's BTree package, as mentioned by Ealdwulf)

• or the whole list ordered but only after a day's work of random insertions?: use sort like you're doing, or like S.Lott's answer

• or just a few 'smallest' items at any moment? : use heapq