[Dev] Python startup times

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:45 AM 7/27/2005 -0700, Alec Flett wrote:
>I think unfortunately this isn't really testing the zipping of python 
>files - just executing "pass" does not load any of the libraries from the .zip

Actually, it does.  Try this experiment for yourself:

     python -c "import sys; print sys.modules.keys()"

If you go through the list of module names printed, you'll find that quite 
a few of them (e.g. warnings, exceptions, site, types, some parts of re, 
os.path and others) are coming from .py files that are imported by Python 
as part of its normal startup operations.  So yes, "pass" does load quite a 
few libraries from the .zip, and that's what accounts for the 350ms 
difference on the Mac start time, and the 40ms or so difference on the 
faster machine.