[PyQt] Serious performance problem with sipQtFindConnection

[Giovanni Bajo]

Hi Phil,

after some days/weeks of debugging/profiling some code without really 
getting any clue at the Python level, I tried oprofile on the code, and 
was shocked by sipQtFindConnection being shown as top entry (50% of the 
total time spent in that execution, with total execution time being 32 
seconds on my PC; so it's about 16 seconds spent in that function only).

By doing some further research, it looks like the offending call is in 
sipWrapper_clear() (called from sipWrapper_dealloc()). For each SIP 
object destroyed, sipQtFindConnection is invoked, and it goes through a 
linear search of all connections.

Since I have many small objects wrapped with SIP (which I allocate and 
deallocate galore), I can see this taking a lot of time.

I am a little concerned because the code I'm profiling isn't Qt-related 
at all: it uses my own SIP objects, but not Qt. sipQtFindConnection 
seems more a bridge between SIP and Qt signal/slot, and it's a pity that 
all SIP objects in a program must pay this penalty (even those not 
related to Qt at all).

I was wondering if something could be done in this regard. I can help 
with the coding leg-work, but I need some inputs as what can be tried to 
fix this.

Thanks in advance!
-- 
Giovanni Bajo