[Python-Dev] Importing .pyc in -O mode and vice versa (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Nov 6 00:34:05 CET 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

That should never be better: the system will cache the directory blocks, also, and it will do a better job than Python will.

If that's really the case, then why do discussions of how improve Python startup speeds seem to focus on the number of stat calls made?

Also, cacheing isn't the only thing to consider. Last time I looked at the implementation of unix file systems, they mostly seemed to do directory lookups by linear search. Unless that's changed a lot, I have a hard time seeing how that's going to beat Python's highly-tuned dictionaries.

-- Greg

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