Python implementation of avro slow?

Question

I'm reading some data from avro file using the avro library. It takes about a minute to load 33K objects from the file. This seem very slow to me, specially with the Java version reading the same file in about 1sec.

Here is the code, am I doing something wrong?

import avro.datafile
import avro.io
from time import time

def load(filename):
    fo = open(filename, "rb")
    reader = avro.datafile.DataFileReader(fo, avro.io.DatumReader())
    for i, record in enumerate(reader):
        pass

    return i + 1

def main(argv=None):
    import sys
    from argparse import ArgumentParser

    argv = argv or sys.argv

    parser = ArgumentParser(description="Read avro file")


    start = time()
    num_records = load("events.avro")
    end = time()

    print("{0} records in {1} seconds".format(num_records, end - start))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Answer 1

It appears there is a python package called fastavro that is a fast Cython implementation, but is less feature-complete.

https://bitbucket.org/tebeka/fastavro