TL;DR - ISSUE 21118

The long Story

Josh Rosenberg found out that the str.translate() function is very slow compared to the bytes.translate , he raised an issue, stating that:

In Python 3, str.translate() is usually a performance pessimization, not optimization.

Why was str.translate() slow?

The main reason for str.translate() to be very slow was that the lookup used to be in a Python dictionary.

The usage of maketrans made this problem worse. The similar approach using bytes builds a C array of 256 items to fast table lookup. Hence the usage of higher level Python dict makes the str.translate() in Python 3.4 very slow.

What happened now?

The first approach was to add a small patch, translate_writer, However the speed increase was not that pleasing. Soon another patch fast_translate was tested and it yielded very nice results of up to 55% speedup.

The main change as can be seen from the file is that the Python dictionary lookup is changed into a C level lookup.

The speeds now are almost the same as bytes

unpatched patched str.translate 4.55125927699919 0.7898181750006188 str.translate from bytes trans 1.8910855210015143 0.779950579000797

A small note here is that the performance enhancement is only prominent in ASCII strings.

As J.F.Sebastian mentions in a comment below, Before 3.5, translate used to work in the same way for both ASCII and non-ASCII cases. However from 3.5 ASCII case is much faster.

Earlier ASCII vs non-ascii used to be almost same, however now we can see a great change in the performance.

It can be an improvement from 71.6μs to 2.33μs as seen in this answer.

The following code demonstrates this

python3.5 -m timeit -s "text = 'mJssissippi'*100; d=dict(J='i')" "text.translate(d)" 100000 loops, best of 3: 2.3 usec per loop python3.5 -m timeit -s "text = 'm\U0001F602ssissippi'*100; d={'\U0001F602': 'i'}" "text.translate(d)" 10000 loops, best of 3: 117 usec per loop python3 -m timeit -s "text = 'm\U0001F602ssissippi'*100; d={'\U0001F602': 'i'}" "text.translate(d)" 10000 loops, best of 3: 91.2 usec per loop python3 -m timeit -s "text = 'mJssissippi'*100; d=dict(J='i')" "text.translate(d)" 10000 loops, best of 3: 101 usec per loop

Tabulation of the results: