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João M.C. Teixeira
João M.C. Teixeira

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Time needed to search in a list or set in Python

The time it takes to search an item in a list depends on the size of the list and the position of the item in it. While for set the time cost is maintained. Here, we do not consider the time needed to create the lists and sets.

l100 = list(range(100))
s100 = set(range(100))
l100k = list(range(100_000))
s100k = set(range(100_000))
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%%timeit
100 in l100
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895 ns ± 31.2 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)

%%timeit
100 in s100
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25.8 ns ± 1.56 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

%%timeit
100_000 in l100k
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874 µs ± 22.6 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

%%timeit
100_000 in s100k
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25.6 ns ± 0.812 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

%%timeit
1 in l100k
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33.5 ns ± 0.589 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

%%timeit
1 in s100k
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26.4 ns ± 1.13 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)

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