speed

[Beat Cornaz]

A while ago I did a test for speed with 'repeat for'. It turned out that with items it worked the fasted. Chars were slower and words even more so.

Now I redid the test with 'LineOffset'. To my surprise: with chars was considerably faster.

A long list with lines like 'aabcbcax' (chars) OR "a,a,b,c,b,ca,x," (items)  and finding a specific line gave the following time results in ticks (depending on how deep down the wanted line was in the list ) :

items		chars
57			42		
4530			2871
2908			2087
24			15

I did the lineOffset for 1 specific string and repeated the lineOffset  100000 times. The variation with the chars was about 1.35 to 1.6 times as fast as the variation with items.
Can anybody confirm this from experience and maybe explain why the LineOffset works faster with strings of chars, while the repeat for works faster with items?

I would also appreciate any other insights in how to speed up routines, as I am working a a program with Evolutionary Algorithms and I need to do hundred of thousands of calculations in each run, so speed is quite important.

Cheers, Beat