Improving interpreter startup speed

[BJörn Lindqvist]

2008/10/26 James Mills <prologic at shortcircuit.net.au>:
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 11:23 AM, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
>> How are you getting those numbers? 330 μs is still pretty fast, isn't
>> it? :) Most disks have a seek time of 10-20 ms so it seem implausible
>> to me that Ruby would be able to cold start in 47 ms.
>
> $ time python -c "pass"
>
> real    0m0.051s
> user    0m0.036s
> sys     0m0.008s

Pedro was talking about cold startup time:

$ sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
$ time python -c "pass"

real	0m0.627s
user	0m0.016s
sys	0m0.008s

That is quite a lot and for short scripts the startup time can easily
dominate the total time.

> And yes I agree. the CPython interpreter startup times is
> a stupid thing to be worrying about, especially since that
> is never the bottleneck.

I disagree. The extra time Python takes to start makes it unsuitable
for many uses. For example, if you write a simple text editor then
Pythons longer startup time might be to much.


-- 
mvh Björn