py2exe uses Python's modulefinder to find the modules and packages that belong to one or more scripts. For not too small projects, the runtime of modulefinder is quite long. On my system, the time to find all 533 modules my project needs is around 48 seconds. So, I profiled the Python 2.4 modulefinder, and patched it for a speedup of a factor of ~2.5 - the time required to find the modules drops to around 19 seconds.
Logged In: YES user_id=11105 Here is a description of the changes in the patch: Modulefinder's scan_code method did call ord() on each character of the co.co_code string, that took the most time, and it built the argument (again with ord() calls) of each bytecode that had one, even if it was never used. The patch changes the code to - work on the characters of the co.co_code string, avoiding the calls to ord() altogether - create the bytecodes argument only when needed, - create the bytecode with struct.pack which is faster. I did not stop there, so other changes were that the objects that scan_code needs most are passed as default arguments to the functions instead of looking them up in the global namespace. This patch will probably be in the next py2exe release, so it will undergo some testing. I would appreciate comments on the patch.
