[Python-Dev] Startup time

[Martin v. Löwis]

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

> While Python's general speed has gone up, its startup speed has slowed
> down!

Hear hear! I always thought you didn't care about startup time at all
:-)

> I have no time to investigate the cause right now, although I have a
> suspicion that the problem might be in loading too much of the
> encoding framework at start time (I recall Marc-Andre and Martin
> debating this earlier).

That would be easy to determine: Just disable the block

#if defined(Py_USING_UNICODE) && defined(HAVE_LANGINFO_H) && defined(CODESET)

in pythonrun.c, and see whether it changes anything. To my knowledge,
this is the only cause of loading encodings during startup on Unix.

Regards,
Martin