In statistics, there is a FIXME on Line 250 above _decimal_to_ratio that says:

# FIXME This is faster than Fraction.from_decimal, but still too slow.

Half of the time is spent in a conversion in d.as_tuple(). Decimal internally stores the digits as a string, but in d.as_tuple(), the digits are individually cast to integers and returned as a tuple of integers.

This is OK, but _decimal_to_ratio undoes the work that was done in d.as_tuple() by adding them all back into an integer. A similar, but slightly different approach is taken in Fractions.from_decimal, where the tuple is cast into a string and then parsed into an integer. We can be a lot faster if we use the _int instance variable directly.

In the case of _decimal_to_ratio, the new code seems to be twice as fast with usage _decimal_to_ratio(Decimal(str(random.random()))):


def _decimal_to_ratio(d):
    sign, exp = d._sign, d._exp
    if exp in ('F', 'n', 'N'):  # INF, NAN, sNAN
        assert not d.is_finite()
        return (d, None)
    num = int(d._int)
    if exp < 0:
        den = 10**-exp
    else:
        num *= 10**exp
        den = 1
    if sign:
        num = -num
    return (num, den)

If the performance improvement is considered worthwhile, here are a few solutions I see.

1) Use _int directly in fractions and statistics.

2) Add a digits_as_str method to Decimal. This prevents exposing _int as an implementation detail, and makes sense to me since I suspect there is a lot of code casting the tuple of int to a string anyway. 

3) Add a parameter to as_tuple for determining whether digits should be returned as a string or a tuple.

4) Deprecate _int in Decimal and add a new reference str_digits.

There are probably more solutions. I lean towards 4, because it makes usage easier and avoids cluttering Decimal with methods. 

Here is what I used for benchmarks:

========

import timeit

old_setup = """
import random
from decimal import Decimal

def _decimal_to_ratio(d):
    sign, digits, exp = d.as_tuple()
    if exp in ('F', 'n', 'N'):  # INF, NAN, sNAN
        assert not d.is_finite()
        return (d, None)
    num = 0
    for digit in digits:
        num = num*10 + digit
    if exp < 0:
        den = 10**-exp
    else:
        num *= 10**exp
        den = 1
    if sign:
        num = -num
    return (num, den)

def run_it():
    dec = Decimal(str(random.random()))
    _decimal_to_ratio(dec)
"""

new_setup = """
import random
from decimal import Decimal

def _decimal_to_ratio(d):
    sign, exp = d._sign, d._exp
    if exp in ('F', 'n', 'N'):  # INF, NAN, sNAN
        assert not d.is_finite()
        return (d, None)
    num = int(d._int)
    if exp < 0:
        den = 10**-exp
    else:
        num *= 10**exp
        den = 1
    if sign:
        num = -num
    return (num, den)

def run_it():
    dec = Decimal(str(random.random()))
    _decimal_to_ratio(dec)
"""

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("Testing proposed implementation")
    print("number = 10000")
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=new_setup).timeit(number=10000))
    print("number = 100000")         
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=new_setup).timeit(number=100000))
    print("number = 1000000")     
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=new_setup).timeit(number=1000000))

    print("Testing old implementation")
    print("number = 10000")
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=old_setup).timeit(number=10000))
    print("number = 100000")         
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=old_setup).timeit(number=100000))
    print("number = 1000000")     
    print(timeit.Timer(stmt='run_it()', setup=old_setup).timeit(number=1000000))