Painfully slow startup

[Jeremy Hylton]

In article <8pjk2c$e87$1 at nnrp1.deja.com>,
  markscottwright at hotmail.com wrote:
> Is python typically very slow when starting up?  When I compare a
> simple 'hello world' application against perl, python is 2 orders of
> magnitude slower on startup.

I have no idea if any of this is relevant on Windows, but imagine it
could be:

Yes.  Python is rather slow to startup.  It does a lot of file system
access to figure out where the libraries are installed and what site
customizations might be in effect.  IIRC the cost varies with the
complexity of your Python install.

I believe the PYTHONHOME environment variable can be used to
short-circuit this startup by specifying the location of the Python
install.

--
-- Jeremy Hylton, <http://www.python.org/~jeremy/>


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