[Distutils] Performance implications of having large numbers of eggs?

[Dave Peterson]

Has anyone done any investigation into the performance implications of 
having large numbers of eggs installed?  Is there any sort of 
performance hit? 


It seems to me that having a really large path might slow down imports a 
bit, though I suspect this is in C code so probably not a significant 
problem.  It also seems like there might be some startup penalties due 
to the overhead of setting up the path when using eggs, but this is a 
one-time cost during python startup, so probably not too bad either.


I'm asking because we're in the process to switching our open-source 
Enthought Tool Suite library to a distribution of components via eggs 
and we're having some internal debate as to whether we need to minimize 
the number of eggs or not.   It definitely seems nice to have smaller 
subsets of functionality -- from the point of being able to make things 
stable,  managing their APIs, managing cross-component dependencies, and 
from the user update size viewpoint.  But are we paying a performance 
penalty for going too small in scope with our eggs?


-- Dave