In message: <15963.57541.244513.169979@montanaro.dyndns.org> Skip Montanaro writes:

It's probably somewhat invalid to equate number of system calls with application runtime. I redumped my last ktrace file just now with timestamps. Here are some computed intervals:

interval time -------- ---- start -> open hammiefilter.pyc 0.071 open hammiefilter.pyc -> open hammie.db 0.516 open hammie.db -> close hammie.db 0.084 close hammie.db -> program end 0.011

This is good info. Can you add in the time intervals between loading each of the modules? That might point out which modules are actually expensive (or if it's none in particular). - Alex