Legacy code does not work with new large csv file - pandas

Question

I have legacy code writing for pandas.
Now the new data become very large (in CSV format), and it is hard to read_csv with the new files (the file sizes ~ 7,8GB and will be larger in the future).
Could you suggest me the best way to not change the legacy code but still working with large CSV files? I thought to switch to spark but it seems that I will have to change a lot of code.
Many thanks

Answer 1

Have you tried reading the file in chunks? And defining the column dtypes beforehand might help boost the performance
chunksize = 1000000
chunks = pd.read_csv(filepath, dtype=dtypes, chunksize=chunksize)
df = pd.concat((chunk for chunk in chunks), ignore_index=True)
EDIT: Another trick is to reduce the dataframe's memory usage after loading. This is from a Kaggle kernel
def reduce_mem_usage(props):
start_mem_usg = props.memory_usage().sum() / 1024**2
print("Memory usage of properties dataframe is :",start_mem_usg," MB")
NAlist = [] # Keeps track of columns that have missing values filled in.
for col in props.columns:
if props[col].dtype != object: # Exclude strings
# Print current column type
print("******************************")
print("Column: ",col)
print("dtype before: ",props[col].dtype)
# make variables for Int, max and min
IsInt = False
mx = props[col].max()
mn = props[col].min()
# Integer does not support NA, therefore, NA needs to be filled
if not np.isfinite(props[col]).all():
NAlist.append(col)
props[col].fillna(mn-1,inplace=True)
# test if column can be converted to an integer
asint = props[col].fillna(0).astype(np.int64)
result = (props[col] - asint)
result = result.sum()
if result > -0.01 and result < 0.01:
IsInt = True
# Make Integer/unsigned Integer datatypes
if IsInt:
if mn >= 0:
if mx < 255:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.uint8)
elif mx < 65535:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.uint16)
elif mx < 4294967295:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.uint32)
else:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.uint64)
else:
if mn > np.iinfo(np.int8).min and mx < np.iinfo(np.int8).max:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.int8)
elif mn > np.iinfo(np.int16).min and mx < np.iinfo(np.int16).max:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.int16)
elif mn > np.iinfo(np.int32).min and mx < np.iinfo(np.int32).max:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.int32)
elif mn > np.iinfo(np.int64).min and mx < np.iinfo(np.int64).max:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.int64)
# Make float datatypes 32 bit
else:
props[col] = props[col].astype(np.float32)
# Print new column type
print("dtype after: ",props[col].dtype)
print("******************************")
# Print final result
print("___MEMORY USAGE AFTER COMPLETION:___")
mem_usg = props.memory_usage().sum() / 1024**2
print("Memory usage is: ",mem_usg," MB")
print("This is ",100*mem_usg/start_mem_usg,"% of the initial size")
return props, NAlist
You can simply apply the above function to your dataframe, and it will help especially in cases where your data has many numeric columns.