In PR ( https://github.com/dask/fastparquet/pull/580 ) included in `fastparquet` release `0.6.0`, `array_decode_utf8` was dropped from `fastparquet.speedups`. We should either drop or replace [this benchmark from `notebook/benchmark_vlen.ipynb`]( https://github.com/zarr-developers/numcodecs/blame/15f17138b9b41e99faa4a2670e2580a782547d6b/notebooks/benchmark_vlen.ipynb#L45-L67 ). For context this notebook was originally added in PR ( https://github.com/zarr-developers/numcodecs/pull/56 ).