Does pandas iterrows have performance issues?

Question

I have noticed very poor performance when using iterrows from pandas.

Is this something that is experienced by others? Is it specific to iterrows and should this fun

Answer 1

Here's the way to do your problem. This is all vectorized.

In [58]: df = table1.merge(table2,on='letter')

In [59]: df['calc'] = df['number1']*df['number2']

In [60]: df
Out[60]: 
  letter  number1  number2  calc
0      a       50      0.2    10
1      a       50      0.5    25
2      b      -10      0.1    -1
3      b      -10      0.4    -4

In [61]: df.groupby('letter')['calc'].max()
Out[61]: 
letter
a         25
b         -1
Name: calc, dtype: float64

In [62]: df.groupby('letter')['calc'].idxmax()
Out[62]: 
letter
a         1
b         2
Name: calc, dtype: int64

In [63]: df.loc[df.groupby('letter')['calc'].idxmax()]
Out[63]: 
  letter  number1  number2  calc
1      a       50      0.5    25
2      b      -10      0.1    -1