> I would be curious to know what's causing the reduction in performance ... is it only part of the program or is that the performance of the Python code being

> I would be curious to know what's causing the reduction in performance ... is it only part of the program or is that the performance of the Python code being interpreted. Mostly the latter but also a bit of the former: I could have optimised it further — at the expense of idiomaticity — but I believe gains would be marginal. Other than that, Python is not that fast so you pay some penalties there too.