__file__ access extremely slow

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:12:25 -0300, John Machin <sjmachin at lexicon.net>  
escribió:

>> > (2) This will stop processing on the first object in sys.modules that
>> > doesn't have a __file__ attribute. Since these objects aren't
>> > *guaranteed* to be modules,
>
> Definitely not guaranteed to be modules. Python itself drops non-modules  
> in
> there! Python 2.3 introduced four keys mapped to None -- one of these was
> dropped in 2.4, but the other three are still there in 2.5 and 2.6:

In case someone wonders what all those None are: they're a "flag" telling  
the import machinery that those modules don't exist (to avoid doing a  
directory scan over and over, because Python<2.7 attempts first to do a  
relative import, and only if unsuccessful attempts an absolute one)

> C:\junk>\python23\python -c "import sys; print [k for (k, v) in
> sys.modules.items() if v is None]"
> ['encodings.encodings', 'encodings.codecs', 'encodings.exceptions',
> 'encodings.types']

In this case, somewhere inside the encodings package, there are statements  
like "import types" or "from types import ...", and Python could not find  
types.py in the package directory.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina