I don't see a place to submit patches. Is there a patch manager for numpy? Here's a patch to defer importing 'tempfile' until needed. I previously mentioned one other place that didn't need tempfile. With this there is no 'import tempfile' during 'import numpy' This improves startup by about 7% --- numpy/lib/_datasource.py (revision 5576) +++ numpy/lib/_datasource.py (working copy) @@ -35,7 +35,6 @@ __docformat__ = "restructuredtext en" import os -import tempfile from shutil import rmtree from urlparse import urlparse @@ -131,6 +130,7 @@ self._destpath = os.path.abspath(destpath) self._istmpdest = False else: + import tempfile self._destpath = tempfile.mkdtemp() self._istmpdest = True Andrew dalke@dalkescientific.com