I don’t know how Pandas implements this, but I did test it empirically. I ran the following code (in a Jupyter notebook) to test the speed of the operation:
def get_dummy_df(n):
return pd.DataFrame({'a': [1,2]*n, 'b': [4,5]*n, 'c': [7,8]*n})
df = get_dummy_df(100)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
df = get_dummy_df(1000)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
df = get_dummy_df(10000)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
df = get_dummy_df(100000)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
df = get_dummy_df(1000000)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
df = get_dummy_df(10000000)
print df.shape
%timeit df_r = df[df.columns[::-1]]
The output was:
(200, 3)
1000 loops, best of 3: 419 µs per loop
(2000, 3)
1000 loops, best of 3: 425 µs per loop
(20000, 3)
1000 loops, best of 3: 498 µs per loop
(200000, 3)
100 loops, best of 3: 2.66 ms per loop
(2000000, 3)
10 loops, best of 3: 25.2 ms per loop
(20000000, 3)
1 loop, best of 3: 207 ms per loop
As you can see, in the first 3 cases, the overhead of the operation is what takes most of the time (400-500µs), but from the 4th case, the time it takes starts to be proportional to the amount of data, increasing in an order of magnitude each time.
So, assuming there must also be a proportion to n, it seems that we are dealing with O(m*n)