[Python-Dev] this is what happens if you freeze all the modules required for startup

[Donald Stufft]

On Apr 17, 2014, at 2:23 PM, Jurko Gospodnetić <jurko.gospodnetic at pke.hr> wrote:

>  Hi.
> 
> On 17.4.2014. 19:57, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Jurko Gospodnetić
>> <jurko.gospodnetic at pke.hr <mailto:jurko.gospodnetic at pke.hr>> wrote:
>> 
>>       I would really love to have better startup times in production,
>> 
>> What's your use case? I understand why startup time is important for Hg,
>> but I'd like to understand what other situations occur frequently enough
>> to worry about it.
> 
>  The first one that pops to mind is scripting when automating different system administration tasks.
> 
>  When you automate something that ends up calling lots of different Python scripts - the startup times add up. Yes, I know you can update the system so that the scripts get called inside a single Python process, but that often requires major refactoring, e.g.:
>  - you have to refactor those scripts to be importable while they were originally prepared to be used as 'stand-alone executables'
>  - you either have to use Python as your external automation tool or you need to implement some sort of a Python based tool runner daemon process
> 
>  Another example is the speed at which some automated test suits run that need to call external Python scripts. Such suites often call thousands of such scripts so their startup times add up to such numbers that Python gets a bad rep. And shaving off unnecessarily wasted seconds or minutes in a test suite is always good, as it speeds up the whole develop/test cycle. :-)

pip invokes a ton of pythons in a subprocess in it’s test suite, and the “install from sdist” stuff tends to invoke 1-3 python’s per thing you install too. So any speed up there would make installing stuff faster.

> 
>  I've been in situations where I got a request to 'convert those Python scripts to batch files so they would run faster'. :-) And, while I really love Python as a development language, simple scripts implemented in it often do make the system feel kind of sluggish. :-(
> 
>  And with that in mind, the effect of systems becoming 'even more sluggish' when upgrading them to use the new 'Python 3' version, even if that slowdown is not all startup related, often comes as an additional slap in the face. :-(
> 
>  Best regards,
>    Jurko Gospodnetić
> 
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-----------------
Donald Stufft
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