2008/8/15 Andrew Dalke dalke@dalkescientific.com:
On Aug 15, 2008, at 6:41 PM, Andrew Dalke wrote:
I don't think it's enough. I don't like environmental variable tricks like that. My tests suggest: current SVN: 0.12 seconds my patch: 0.10 seconds removing some top-level imports: 0.09 seconds my patch and removing some additional top-level imports: 0.08 seconds (this is a guess)
First, I reverted my patch, so my import times went from 0.10 second to 0.12 seconds.
Turns out I didn't revert everything.
As of the SVN version from 10 minutes ago, "import numpy" on my machine takes 0.18 seconds, not 0.12 seconds. My patch should cut the import time by about 30-40% more from what it is. On some machines. Your milage may vary :)
I realize this is already a very complicated issue, but it's worth pointing out that the times you measure are not necessarily the times users care about. These numbers are once everything is loaded into disk cache. They don't reflect, say, interactive startup time, or time it takes in a script that uses substantial disk access (i.e. which fills the cache with something else). I realize this is the only available basis for comparison, but do keep in mind that improvements of a few milliseconds here may make a much larger difference in practice - or a much smaller difference.
Anne