Dieter Maurer wrote: > The comparison between warm start (few disc io) and cold start > (much disc io) tells you that the import process is highly > io dominated (for cold starts).
Correct. However, I would expect that the contents of existing directories is cached, and it might be that the absence of a directory on sys.path is also cached (I know Linux does negative dentry caching). > I know that this does not prove that the failing opens contribute > significantly. However, a colleague reported that the > "import.c" patch (essential for the reduction of the number of opens) > resulted in significant (but not specified) improvements. When I experimented with startup time for 2.4, I found that these calls don't matter at all in any significant way (atleast not for warm starts). Instead, I found that reducing the size of .pyc files, by sharing interned strings, gives more speedup (and indeed, 2.4 changed the marshal format to accommodate shared interned strings). So I would agree that IO makes a significant part of startup, but I doubt it is directory reading (unless perhaps you have an absent NFS server or some such). Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
