[padobson]

What performance gain could be had from using cStringIO as described here:

http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/

It seemed like the concatenation was the primary bottleneck in this case.

Also, its worth noting that percentage gains on performance have huge cost savings on infrastructure at scale. That's why blogs like this are valuable because the user experience improves while the cost to provide it is reduced.

[pavpanchekha]

By the end the primary overhead was dictionary lookup or iteration overhead, so I doubt this would have mattered