How to optimize Python code for speed?

I've been profiling my script with cProfile and it looks like most of the time is spent in a loop that processes a large list. Would switching to NumPy help?

NumPy is great for numeric data, but for generic Python objects you might want to look into multiprocessing or concurrent.futures to parallelize the work.

Also consider using @lru_cache if your function is called repeatedly with the same arguments.