Optimization story involving something silly I call "dict+"

Here's a little interesting story about using MongoKit to quickly draw items from a MongoDB

So I had a piece of code that was doing a big batch update. It was slow. It took about 0.5 seconds per user and I sometimes had a lot of users to run it for.

The code looked something like this:

 for play in db.PlayedQuestion.find({'user.$id': user._id}):
    if play.winner == user:
         bla()
    elif play.draw:
         ble()
    else:
         blu()

Because the model PlayedQuestion contains DBRefs MongoKit will automatically look them up for every iteration in the main loop. Individually very fast (thank you indexes) but because of the number of operations very slow in total. Here's how to make it much faster:

   for play in db.PlayedQuestion.collection.find({'user.$id': user._id}):

The problem with this is that you get dict instances for each which is more awkward to work with. I.e. instead of `play.winner` you have use `play['winner'].id`. Here's my solution that makes this a lot easier:

class dict_plus(dict):

  def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
       if 'collection' in kwargs:  # excess we don't need
           kwargs.pop('collection')
       dict.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
       self._wrap_internal_dicts()

   def _wrap_internal_dicts(self):
       for key, value in self.items():
           if isinstance(value, dict):
               self[key] = dict_plus(value)

   def __getattr__(self, key):
       if key.startswith('__'):
           raise AttributeError(key)
       return self[key]

  ...

 for play in db.PlayedQuestion.collection.find({'user.$id': user._id}):
    play = dict_plus(play)
    if play.winner.id == user._id:
         bla()
    elif play.draw:
         ble()
    else:
         blu()

Now, the whole thing takes 0.01 seconds instead of 0.5. 50 times faster!!