[Distutils] For maximum performance, Python packages are best installed as zip files.

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 07:08:19 -0400
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> I’m not sure if that is still the case with modern SSDs, but I think the idea is that by putting everything inside of zip files you reduce the number of stat calls that Python needs to do (they flip side of this is that pkg_resources is incredibly slow because it needs to issue a ton of stat calls on import).

I don't think SSDs have anything to do in it since the kernel should
cache directory contents, rather it's the number of system calls issued.
But as Paul says, in Python 3 importlib got a lot of optimization work
on this front, so this advice probably doesn't apply anymore.

Regards

Antoine.