[Python-Dev] C extension import time (original) (raw)

Stefan Krah stefan at bytereef.org
Fri Oct 11 14:24:29 CEST 2013


Hi,

recently there has been some talk about reducing import times. It seems that the current import strategy for C extensions (i.e. importing the extension at the bottom of the .py file) is quite slow:

====================

import sys

for i in range(10000): import decimal del sys.modules('decimal') del sys.modules('_decimal')

====================

With the regular decimal.py the script is about 9 times slower than running it with a modified decimal.py that just contains "from _decimal import *".

I don't know enough about the import mechanism to say whether this is a particularly good benchmark. If it is, perhaps we should devise another strategy for loading C extensions.

Stefan Krah



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