[Numpy-discussion] "import numpy" is slow

Stéfan van der Walt stefan at sun.ac.za
Thu Jul 31 08:20:59 EDT 2008


2008/7/31 Andrew Dalke <dalke at dalkescientific.com>:
> The user base for numpy might be .. 10,000 people?  100,000 people?
> Let's go with the latter, and assume that with command-line scripts,
> CGI scripts, and the other programs that people write in order to
> help do research means that numpy is started on average 10 times a day.
>
> 100,000 people * 10 times / day * 0.1 seconds per startup
>    = almost 28 people-hours spent each day waiting for numpy to start.

I don't buy that argument.  No single person is agile enough to do
anything useful in the half a second or so it takes to start up NumPy.
 No one is *waiting* for NumPy to start.  Just by answering this
e-mail I could have (and maybe should have) started NumPy three
hundred and sixty times.

I don't want to argue about this, though.  Write the patches, file a
ticket, and hopefully someone will deem them important enough to apply
them.

Stéfan



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