[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Paul Moore]

On 11/22/05, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Actually loading the module then requires decompressing
> the code which takes a whole lot longer than just reading
> a file from the file system.
>
> In summary, things get slower when importing from ZIP files;
> it really only makes sense for applications that have a long
> run time and where startup is not that important, e.g.
> Zope et al.

It's a long time ago, and back prior to PEP 302, but I believe that
the original version of the zipimport PEP (PEP 273 by Jim Ahlstrom)
included some timings based on the original patch. While this did show
slowdowns with compressed zip files, it showed distinct speedups with
*un*compressed zip files. IIRC, this was explained as because a
zipfile directory scan is faster than multiple filesystem stats.

So someone once recommended that zipfiles on sys.path should be in
uncompressed format, for performance reasons. That recommendation got
lost a long time ago, though.

Paul.