Why is Pandas Concatenation (pandas.concat) so Memory Inefficient?

I've had performance issues concatenating a large number of DataFrames to a 'growing' DataFrame. My workaround was appending all sub DataFrames to a list, and then concatenating the list of DataFrames once processing of the sub DataFrames has been completed.

Looks like you are trying to row-wise concat, even though you text indicates that you what column-wise. Specify axis=1.

Other points to consider:

copy=False flag will not help at all; this only matters if you are not concatting blocks of the same dtype (which you indicated you are).

pd.concat does use np.concatenate under the hood. If you think you can do better, then go for it.

def make_frames(n=100, rows=100, cols=100):    return [ pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(rows,cols),columns=np.random.choice(110,100,replace=False)) for i in xrange(n) ]In [28]: l = make_frames(rows=10000)In [29]: l[0].head()Out[29]:         60        75        101       103       87        29        10        106       71        26        30        83        2         28        99        85        88        62        58        18        42        1         105       25        34     ...          102       27        22   \0 -0.854117 -0.007549 -0.510359 -0.993757  0.877635 -0.303199 -1.488548  1.179360  0.578095  0.807792  0.169930 -1.781403  0.204696 -0.515057 -0.954246  1.106073  0.666516 -1.146988  1.335709  0.362838 -0.675379  1.483469  0.670385 -0.483312 -0.703795    ...     1.322645 -1.942183  1.053502   1  2.057542  0.860946 -0.037665 -0.347265  0.152562 -0.859537  1.431045  1.306419  0.623013  1.192325  0.909597  1.710507  1.319330 -0.402874  1.749581  1.223489  0.036354  0.140255  0.844330 -0.091447 -0.347245  0.259055  1.187882 -0.216858 -1.421336    ...     1.122068  0.887538  0.205854   2 -0.077974  0.947503  0.688666  0.288104 -1.275329 -0.840847 -2.014090 -1.318507 -0.889416 -0.098005  0.055492  0.847597 -1.289428 -0.910093  0.201312 -1.699879  0.103062 -1.041608  0.379171 -1.089937  0.894626 -1.500215 -0.501182  0.042078 -0.840789    ...     0.539192  0.193256  0.196138   3  0.291993  1.138577  1.061509  0.856553  1.118931  0.725806 -0.689776  1.337957 -1.009835 -0.976506 -0.392317  0.295876  0.092240  0.418201  0.473585  0.013809 -1.169947  0.424797  0.019051 -0.526189  0.066991 -0.268750  1.277004 -0.736560 -0.314987    ...     0.272045 -0.333272  0.573267   4 -2.073985 -0.016950 -1.712770  0.286212 -0.159693 -0.495864  1.286450 -1.168880  1.031456 -3.080568  1.443880 -0.604405  0.406383 -0.162986  1.077255  1.160726  0.943949 -1.517681 -1.049972  1.208850 -0.859617 -0.145358 -0.638898  0.248012 -2.985845    ...    -0.699697  0.051352  0.575304           69        76        91        45        14        37        0         81        38        72        107       11        5         73        70        8         90        94        53        3         55        12   0 -0.972965 -0.298674  1.283482  2.344092 -0.597735 -0.407978  0.971726 -0.935620  0.236889 -0.957096 -2.366399 -0.943760  0.293325 -0.240385 -0.392554 -0.887556  0.261402 -2.050122 -1.776865 -1.513899 -0.953916  0.630495  1 -1.471033  0.269830 -0.744507 -0.982779  0.624527 -1.782704  1.197262 -0.297730  1.122939 -1.039226  0.171351 -0.828985  0.698245  0.563430  0.718177  0.682369  1.415918  0.049931  0.648000  1.785455 -0.190021 -1.329753  2 -1.942792  0.560981 -0.353782 -1.637407 -1.495131 -0.593041 -1.617116 -0.910257 -0.506877  0.178378 -0.623986  0.302544  0.279309 -0.266409  0.780306  0.986510 -1.549847  0.063632 -0.480434  1.393221 -1.237682  1.577320  3  0.468151 -1.002872 -0.147329 -0.420609  0.183696  0.527632  0.018911 -2.059989  1.642613 -0.428345  1.350693 -1.323321 -0.247263  0.331525 -2.036862 -2.593575  0.362101 -0.184095  0.419231 -0.633878  0.097499 -0.026044  4 -0.581330 -0.848421 -0.682027 -1.260004 -0.357354 -0.304743  0.409537 -1.189925 -0.609352 -0.610345 -0.798009  0.219822 -0.681764  1.872736  1.738017  0.439148  1.012881 -0.934613 -1.007427 -0.390359  0.329949  0.486906  [5 rows x 100 columns]

Concat, note using axis=1 as this is column-wise concat.

In [31]: df = pd.concat(l,axis=1,ignore_index=True)In [32]: df.info()<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>Int64Index: 10000 entries, 0 to 9999Columns: 10000 entries, 0 to 9999dtypes: float64(10000)memory usage: 763.0 MB

Timings

In [33]: %timeit pd.concat(l,axis=1,ignore_index=True)1 loops, best of 3: 1.15 s per loopIn [34]: %memit pd.concat(l,axis=1,ignore_index=True)peak memory: 2390.25 MiB, increment: 651.28 MiB