Perception of speed

Deleting 16,579 text files over NFS took longer than parsing all 16,579 XML files with cElementTree, extracting data, and writing a new XML file. Sure, it's NFS — but come on.

Working on my thesis means dealing with a set of 16,579 XML documents, around 25 kilobytes each. In an early test, I had extracted some text from each one of them into approximately 16,579 text files.

Fun fact: it took significantly longer to delete the 16,579 text files than it took to parse every single one of the XML files with cElementTree, extract some of the data and build a new single XML file with the result.

Sure, it’s NFS, but… come on.