What's the time complexity of Python's collections.Counter.total()?

Question

What's the time complexity of Python's collections.Counter.total()? I've read the documentation for the method, but there's not mention of its efficiency. Does anyone know how the method is implemented under the hood and what its time complexity is?

Almost certainly it is linear, although I suppose the total could be calculated each time the dict is modified and then the method just retrieves this total, but I doubt it — juanpa.arrivillaga, Dec 02 '21 at 23:51

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 02 '21 at 23:44

5

In CPython, it looks like it implements total() using sum(self.values()), so it's O(number of values in the Counter).

answered Dec 02 '21 at 23:44

rchome

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What's the time complexity of Python's collections.Counter.total()?

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