[Python-Dev] Fixing #7175: a standard location for Python config files

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:14:44 -0400
> Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 12, 2010, at 6:30 AM, Tim Golden wrote:
>>
>> > I don't care how many stats we're doing
>>
>> You might not, but I certainly do.  And I can guarantee you that the
>> authors of command-line tools that have to start up in under ten
>> seconds, for example 'bzr', care too.
>
> The idea that import time is dominated by stat() calls sounds rather
> undemonstrated (and unlikely) to me.

It may be, depending on what you import. I certainly have seen (and
profiled) it. In my experience, stat calls and regex compilation often
come at the top of the culprits for slow imports. In the case of
setuptools namespace package, there was a thread on 23rd april on
distutils-sig about this issue: most of the slowdown came from
unneeded stat (and symlink translations).

cheers,

David