This an optimization story that should not surprise anyone using the Django ORM. But I thought I'd share because I have numbers now! The origin of this came from a real requirement. For a given parent model, I'd like to extract the value of the name column of all its child models, and the turn all these name strings into 1 MD5 checksum string.

Variants

The first attempted looked like this:


artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist):
    names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

The SQL used to generate this is as follows:


SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."artist_id", "main_song"."name", 
"main_song"."text", "main_song"."language", "main_song"."key_phrases", 
"main_song"."popularity", "main_song"."text_length", "main_song"."metadata", 
"main_song"."created", "main_song"."modified", 
"main_song"."has_lastfm_listeners", "main_song"."has_spotify_popularity" 
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

Clearly, I don't need anything but just the name column, version 2:


artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).only("name"):
    names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

Now, the SQL used is:


SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."name" 
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

But still, since I don't really need instances of model class Song I can use the .values() method which gives back a list of dictionaries. This is version 3:


names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
    names.append(song["name"])
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

This time Django figures it doesn't even need the primary key value so it looks like this:


SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

Last but not least; there is an even faster one. values_list(). This time it doesn't even bother to map the column name to the value in a dictionary. And since I only need 1 column's value, I can set flat=True. Version 4 looks like this:


names = []
for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
    names.append(name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

Same SQL gets used this time as in version 3.

The benchmark

Hopefully this little benchmark script speaks for itself:


from songsearch.main.models import *

import hashlib


def f1(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a):
        names.append(song.name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f2(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).only("name"):
        names.append(song.name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f3(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
        names.append(song["name"])
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f4(a):
    names = []
    for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
        names.append(name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
print(Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).count())

print(f1(artist) == f2(artist))
print(f2(artist) == f3(artist))
print(f3(artist) == f4(artist))

# Reporting
import time
import random
import statistics

functions = f1, f2, f3, f4
times = {f.__name__: [] for f in functions}

for i in range(500):
    func = random.choice(functions)
    t0 = time.time()
    func(artist)
    t1 = time.time()
    times[func.__name__].append((t1 - t0) * 1000)

for name in sorted(times):
    numbers = times[name]
    print("FUNCTION:", name, "Used", len(numbers), "times")
    print("\tBEST", min(numbers))
    print("\tMEDIAN", statistics.median(numbers))
    print("\tMEAN  ", statistics.mean(numbers))
    print("\tSTDEV ", statistics.stdev(numbers))

I ran this on my PostgreSQL 11.1 on my MacBook Pro with Django 2.1.7. So the database is on localhost.

The results

276
True
True
True
FUNCTION: f1 Used 135 times
    BEST 6.309986114501953
    MEDIAN 7.531881332397461
    MEAN   7.834429211086697
    STDEV  2.03779968066591
FUNCTION: f2 Used 135 times
    BEST 3.039121627807617
    MEDIAN 3.7298202514648438
    MEAN   4.012803678159361
    STDEV  1.8498943539073027
FUNCTION: f3 Used 110 times
    BEST 0.9920597076416016
    MEDIAN 1.4405250549316406
    MEAN   1.5053835782137783
    STDEV  0.3523240470133114
FUNCTION: f4 Used 120 times
    BEST 0.9369850158691406
    MEDIAN 1.3251304626464844
    MEAN   1.4017681280771892
    STDEV  0.3391019435930447

Bar chart

Discussion

I guess the hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest() stuff is a bit "off-topic" but I checked and it's roughly 300 times faster than building up the names list.

It's clearly better to ask less of Python and PostgreSQL to get a better total time. No surprise there. What was interesting was the proportion of these differences. Memorize that and you'll be better equipped if it's worth the hassle of not using the Django ORM in the most basic form.

Also, do take note that this is only relevant in when dealing with many records. The slowest variant (f1) takes, on average, 7 milliseconds.

Summarizing the difference with percentages compared to the fastest variant:

  • f1 - 573% slower
  • f2 - 225% slower
  • f3 - 6% slower
  • f4 - 0% slower

UPDATE Feb 25 2019

James suggested, although a bit "missing the point", that it could be even faster if all the aggregation is pushed into the PostgreSQL server and then the only thing that needs to transfer from PostgreSQL to Python is the final result.

By the way, name column in this particular benchmark, when concatenated into one big string, is ~4KB. So, with variant f5 it only needs to transfer 32 bytes which will/would make a bigger difference if the network latency is higher.

Here's the whole script: https://gist.github.com/peterbe/b2b7ed95d422ab25a65639cb8412e75e

And the results:

276
True
True
True
False
False
FUNCTION: f1 Used 92 times
    BEST 5.928993225097656
    MEDIAN 7.311463356018066
    MEAN   7.594626882801885
    STDEV  2.2027017044658423
FUNCTION: f2 Used 75 times
    BEST 2.878904342651367
    MEDIAN 3.3979415893554688
    MEAN   3.4774907430013022
    STDEV  0.5120246550765524
FUNCTION: f3 Used 88 times
    BEST 0.9310245513916016
    MEDIAN 1.1944770812988281
    MEAN   1.3105544176968662
    STDEV  0.35922655625999383
FUNCTION: f4 Used 71 times
    BEST 0.7879734039306641
    MEDIAN 1.1661052703857422
    MEAN   1.2262606284987758
    STDEV  0.3561764250427344
FUNCTION: f5 Used 90 times
    BEST 0.7929801940917969
    MEDIAN 1.0334253311157227
    MEAN   1.1836051940917969
    STDEV  0.4001442703048186
FUNCTION: f6 Used 84 times
    BEST 0.80108642578125
    MEDIAN 1.1119842529296875
    MEAN   1.2281338373819988
    STDEV  0.37146893005516973

Result: f5 is takes 0.793ms and (the previous "winner") f4 takes 0.788ms.

I'm not entirely sure why f5 isn't faster but I suspect it's because the dataset is too small for it all to matter.

Compare:

songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
                                                             QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song  (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.014..0.208 rows=276 loops=1)
   Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
 Planning Time: 0.113 ms
 Execution Time: 0.242 ms
(4 rows)

with...

songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT md5(STRING_AGG("main_song"."name", '')) AS "names_hash" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
                                                                QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=229.47..229.48 rows=1 width=32) (actual time=0.278..0.278 rows=1 loops=1)
   ->  Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song  (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.019..0.204 rows=276 loops=1)
         Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
 Planning Time: 0.115 ms
 Execution Time: 0.315 ms
(5 rows)

I ran these two SQL statements about 100 times each and recorded their best possible execution times:

1) The plain SELECT - 0.99ms
2) The STRING_AGG - 1.06ms

So that accounts from ~0.1ms difference only! Which kinda matches the results seen above. All in all, I think the dataset is too small to demonstrate this technique. But, considering the chance that the complexity might not be linear with the performance benefit, it's still interesting.

Even though this tangent is a big off-topic, it is often a great idea to push as much work into the database as you can if applicable. Especially if it means you can transfer a lot less data eventually.

Comments

Post your own comment
Paulo Almeida

You don't need the for loop, right? You can pass the django query directly to ''.join.

Peter Bengtsson

See James's comment below.

There are even faster ways but if you really really need the list of values into python, to do something the database can't do, then this story is relevant.

Paulo Almeida

I didn't mean to imply the story wasn't relevant, on the contrary, since what I said only applies to f4. It's a bonus of that solution that you could forgo the for loop entirely. I wasn't even thinking about speed, just readability. You get something you can iterate over as a list, with values_list and flat=True, but even if you wanted an actual list, you could just call list() on it, with no need for the loop.

That said, I wasn't aware of StringAgg, James's solution is indeed awesome.

Chris Foresman

I came to say the same; at the very least this would be much cleaner.

```
def f4(a):
    names = Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
    return hashlib.md5("".join(list(names)).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()
```

Peter Bengtsson

That is no different. Just styled differently.

Haki Benita

Fetching only neccesary information is good advice. Next step might have been doing the md5 is postgres.

Peter Bengtsson

See James's comment below

James Bennett

Try this:

from django.contrib.postgres.aggregates import StringAgg
from django.db.models import Func

result = Song.objects.filter(
    artist=artist
).aggregate(
    names_hash=Func(
        StringAgg('name', ''), function='md5'
    )
)

Peter Bengtsson

That's awesome! I'm not on my computer so I can't test it but it'd be fast.

Peter Bengtsson

See UPDATE above.

Paolo Melchiorre

Best optimization
I start thinking to suggest this solution before reading the "Update" section.

P.S. They added "MD5" database function in Django dev:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/database-functions/#md5

Michael Peake

In f4, are you not slowing things down by unpacking the list returned by Django only to create an identical list? I don't know how big your dataset is but I would expect `names = Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True)` would be marginally quicker again.

Peter Bengtsson

I think if you do `names = Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True)` then `names` would be a QuerySet instance, not a list. It's not till you start iterating on it that the actual SQL is created and transmitted to the database. But you're probably right that Django will internally consume a cursor fully first. However, if `iter(Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True))` returns a list, and you loop over it, Python will not clone the memory into another place in the heap since lists a mutable. So the IO overhead will be near 0.

Michael Peake

I did a similar exercise to this recently on a project. Once you have lots of data, it's amazing how much speed-up you can get. ORMs have many benefits; however, in hiding the SQL, they can actually let you create some pretty poor architecture because you forget (or simply don't know) about all the queries that go on in the background. I have a love/hate thing going on with them.

Peter Bengtsson

It does feel like 90% of the time the performance does NOT matter. And the rare (but fun!) moments where it matters the Django ORM makes it really easy to escape out to more performant (and maybe less neat) options.

Paolo Melchiorre

Great article Peter.

It would be interesting see in action all functions with a big table of artists.

If you want you can download MusicBrainz's artist JSON dumb (~ 400Mb) and the convert to CSV file with name column only (~1.5 Million artists) to import in PostgreSQL with COPY command.

$ wget http://ftp.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/data/json-dumps/20190227-001001/artist.tar.xz
$ xzcat artist.tar.xz | tail -n +112 | head -n -1 | jq '[.name] | @csv' > artist.csv

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