Have you tried pypy? I got about 2x of C performance for a simulated annealing problem I was working on recently. Ultimately what I realized was that the clever

Have you tried pypy? I got about 2x of C performance for a simulated annealing problem I was working on recently. Ultimately what I realized was that the clever python structures that made prototyping fast were inherently slow (dicts with tuple keys, etc). Once I ported it to C, then went back to python and used the same simple data structures, pypy was practically just as fast as C.