[Distutils] idea for Distribute: make unzipped eggs be the default

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Jul 28, 2009, at 9:38 PM, David Lyon wrote:

>>> I think it might improve
>>> performance
>>> a bit.  (Yes, that's right -- we haven't done a real measurement of
>>> performance, but the few times that people briefly glanced at
> performance
>>> it
>>> seemed like zipping the eggs made them slower to load, not faster.)
>
> It's totally true. unzipped is faster because decompression adds
> another processing layer which consumes more time than doing the
> dma transfer of the extra bytes.
>
> For those still using Z-80s or other 8-bit processors along with
> C or assembler this isn't the case, but it will be true for any 32-
> bit and above architecture running an elephant interpretor like
> python.


I think P.J. Eby is right, we need to test it before analising the  
results we don't have. Anyway even with a minor decrease in  
performance using unzipped eggs makes things easier.

--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com