What is the advantage of iteritems?

Question

I am using Python 2.7.5 @ Mac OS X 10.9.3 with 8GB memory and 1.7GHz Core i5. I have tested time consumption as below.

d = {i:i*2 for i in xrange(10**7*3)} #WARN         


        

Answer 1

as opposed to using the system time command, running in ipython with timeit yields:

d = {i:i*2 for i in xrange(10**7*3)} #WARNING: it takes time and consumes a lot of RAM

timeit for k in d: k, d[k]
1 loops, best of 3: 2.46 s per loop

timeit for k, v in d.iteritems(): k, v
1 loops, best of 3: 1.92 s per loop

i ran this on windows, python 2.7.6. have you run it multiple times to confirm it wasn't something going on with the system itself?