Should I use map or iterate in EarthEngine?

Question

I'm working with Earthengine with a commercial license now so I started worrying about the performance of my computations. As the caching mechanism is preventing me from doing performance checks on my own, I'll ask it here and maybe a GEE developer will pass by.

Should I prefer using map or iterate when looping on a collection?

sequence = ee.List.sequence(1000) 

# map version 
featureList = sequence.map(lambda i: ee.Feature(point, {"id": i}))

# iterate 
featureList = sequence.iterate(
    lambda i, l: ee.List(l).cat(ee.List([ee.Feature(point, {"id": i})])), 
    ee.List([])
)

In this example, I would of course go for the map for readability but there are more tricky situations where forcing myself to think with map is taking more time than a good old iterate.

Answer 1

I can't tell what you're really trying to do, but there are no situations where you can use both map and iterate where you should choose iterate. You should also avoid converting to list when possible..

Also, using the profiler should turn off all caching.