Your pipeline isn't slow. Your parser is.

Short summary

Data pipeline bottlenecks typically hide in the parser—the data ingestion stage—rather than in algorithms. The author reduced an 8-hour batch job to 47 minutes by optimizing ingestion alone, without touching core algorithms. Five proven fixes: measure with profilers first, parse once and pass results downstream, project only needed fields, use faster C-based parsers like orjson, and cache intermediate parsed data.

• •Parsing/ingestion costs typically exceed all other pipeline stages combined
• •Always measure before optimizing—the bottleneck is rarely where intuition suggests
• •Five practical fixes: single-pass parsing, field projection, faster parser libraries, batch reading, and materialized intermediate formats

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