Perception of speed

By Filip Salo; published on December 13, 2006.

Working on my thesis means dealing with a set of 16,579 XML documents, around 25 kilobytes each. In an early test, I had extracted some text from each one of them into approximately 16,579 text files.

Fun fact: it took significantly longer to delete the 16,579 text files than it took to parse every single one of the XML files with cElementTree, extract some of the data and build a new single XML file with the result.

Sure, it's NFS, but... come on.