[Python-Dev] shared data (was: Some thoughts on the codecs...)

[Christopher Petrilli]

Greg Ward [gward@cnri.reston.va.us] wrote:
> On 16 November 1999, Guido van Rossum said:
> > A completely different approach (which, incidentally, HP has lobbied
> > for before; and which has been implemented by Sjoerd Mullender for one
> > particular application) would be to cache a mapping from module names
> > to filenames in a dbm file.  For Sjoerd's app (which imported hundreds
> > of modules) this made a huge difference.
> 
> Hey, this could be a big win for Zope startup.  Dunno how much of that
> 20-30 sec startup overhead is due to loading modules, but I'm sure it's
> a sizeable percentage.  Any Zope-heads listening?

Wow, that's a huge start up that I've personally never seen.  I can't
imagine... even loading the Oracle libraries dynamically, which are HUGE
(2Mb or so), it's only a couple seconds.  

> > The problem is that it's
> > hard to deal with issues like updating the cache while sharing it with
> > other processes and even other users...
> 
> Probably not a concern in the case of Zope: one installation, one
> process, only gets started when it's explicitly shut down and
> restarted.  HmmmMMMMmmm...

This doesn't reslve a lot of other users of Python howver... and Zope
would always benefit, especially when you're running multiple instances
on th same machine... would perhaps share more code.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@amber.org