Python implementation of avro slow?

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 slo开发者_如何学Cw 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()

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

The avro Python package available on PyPI is pure Python, so I'm not surprised if it is slower than Java by an order of magniture or more.

There is an Avro C implementation, but to my knowledge nobody has yet created a Python extension based on it.