diff --git a/pipeline/common/datasets.py b/pipeline/common/datasets.py
index 54c30d9f5..24594fa98 100644
--- a/pipeline/common/datasets.py
+++ b/pipeline/common/datasets.py
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
 from collections import deque
 from io import TextIOWrapper
 from random import Random
-from typing import Iterator, Optional
+from typing import Iterable, Iterator, Optional
 
 
 class Dataset:
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ def shuffle_with_max_lines(
     max_lines: int,
     max_words_in_sentence,
     total_byte_size: int,
-) -> Iterator[str]:
+) -> Iterable[str]:
     """
     Shuffle a line stream, but only retain up to a maximum number of lines in memory.
     Note that the final ordering is determined by the seed and the contents of the file. So
@@ -90,14 +90,21 @@ def shuffle_with_max_lines(
         if len(lines) == max_lines:
             break
 
-    random.shuffle(lines)
+    # random.shuffle requires random access via indexing
+    # deque supports fast adding/removing from its ends with O(1)
+    # but indexing is O(N) which is too slow for shuffling large arrays
+    lines_list = list(lines)
+    lines = None
+    random.shuffle(lines_list)
 
     # Consume the rest of the line stream, but sample based on the probability that adding
     # something to the collection will be representative.
-
     i = 0
     for line in line_stream:
         i = i + 1
+        if lines is None:
+            lines = deque(lines_list)
+            lines_list = None
         # Continuously adjust this estimation in case the first sampled data is not representative.
         total_bytes = total_bytes + len(line.encode("utf-8"))
         average_bytes_per_line = total_bytes / (max_lines + i)
@@ -109,11 +116,14 @@ def shuffle_with_max_lines(
             lines.popleft()
             lines.append(line)
 
-    # Do a final shuffle to ensure that the newly sampled lines are shuffled with the original
-    # set of shuffled lines.
-    random.shuffle(lines)
+    if i != 0:
+        # Do a final shuffle to ensure that the newly sampled lines are shuffled with the original
+        # set of shuffled lines.
+        lines_list = list(lines)
+        del lines
+        random.shuffle(lines_list)
 
-    return lines
+    return lines_list
 
 
 def shuffle_in_temp_files(
diff --git a/tests/test_data_importer.py b/tests/test_data_importer.py
index 771fa7e8b..ecf1d3da0 100644
--- a/tests/test_data_importer.py
+++ b/tests/test_data_importer.py
@@ -127,10 +127,10 @@ def make_url_dataset(lang: str):
 
 
 mono_params = [
-    ("news-crawl", "en", "news_2021", [0, 1, 4, 6, 3, 7, 5, 2]),
-    ("news-crawl", "ru", "news_2021", [0, 1, 4, 6, 3, 7, 5, 2]),
-    ("url", "en", make_url_dataset("en"), [2, 1, 5, 4, 0, 7, 6, 3]),
-    ("url", "ru", make_url_dataset("ru"), [5, 4, 2, 0, 7, 1, 3, 6]),
+    ("news-crawl", "en", "news_2021", [2, 5, 3, 7, 0, 6, 4, 1]),
+    ("news-crawl", "ru", "news_2021", [2, 5, 3, 7, 0, 6, 4, 1]),
+    ("url", "en", make_url_dataset("en"), [3, 4, 5, 0, 1, 6, 2, 7]),
+    ("url", "ru", make_url_dataset("ru"), [5, 6, 2, 4, 7, 1, 3, 0]),
 ]