title: Python 2.x vs 3.x Speed
body: <p>I'm a PhD student and use Python to write the code I use for my research.  My workflow often consists of making a small change to the code, running the program, seeing whether the results  improved, and repeating the process.  Because of this, I find myself spending more time waiting for my program to run than I do actually working on it (a common experience, I know).  I'm currently using the most recent version of Python 2 on my system, so my question is whether switching to Python 3 is going to give me any speed boost or not.  At this point, I don't really have a compelling reason to move to Python 3, so if the execution speeds are similar, I'll probably just stick with 2.x.  I know I'm going to have to modify my code a bit to get it working in Python 3, so it's not trivial to just test it on both versions to see which runs faster.  I'd need to be reasonably confident I will get a speed improvement before I spend the time updating my code to Python 3.</p>