I need to find which percentile of a group of numbers is over a threshold value. Is there a way that this can be speed up? My implementation is much too slow for the intended application. In case this changes anything, I am running my program using `mpirun -np 100 python program.py`. I cannot use numba, as the rest of this program uses try/except statements. import numpy as np my_vals = [] threshold_val = 0.065 for i in range(60000): my_vals.append(np.random.normal(0.05, 0.02)) upper_bound = 100 lower_bound = 0 perc = 50.0 val = np.percentile(my_vals, perc) while abs(val - threshold_val) > 0.00001: print val if val > threshold_val: upper_bound = perc perc = (perc + lower_bound)/2 else: lower_bound = perc perc = (perc+upper_bound)/2 val = np.percentile(my_vals, perc) print perc