[Spambayes] sb_filter.py startup time

[John Lee]

Hello,

I'm having some trouble with sb_filter.py startup performance that I'm
hoping someone may be able to help with. Invocation of sb_filter.py
takes several seconds and spikes CPU usage. It seems that importing
the Spambayes libraries takes a lot of time:

$ time python -c "from spambayes import hammie, Options, mboxutils, storage"

real    0m16.708s
user    0m0.456s
sys     0m9.005s

Importing other packages doesn't seem to produce this problem. For example:

$ time python -c "from os import *"

real    0m2.760s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m1.531s

I'm not a python programmer, so I can only speculate that this is not
normal behavior. Can anyone shed some light on this? 16 second startup
times are inconvenient when fetching a lot of mail.

I've had this problem with both Spambayes 1.0.4 as well as 1.1a4. I'm
running Python 2.5.1, compiled from source, on MacOS X 10.4.10. I'm
currently using the ZODB persistent store but have seen this problem
with pickles and DBM stores as well. The database is currently at 3MB.

Thanks for your help. Cheers,
John