[Python-Dev] Python startup time (original) (raw)

Zero Piraeus schesis at gmail.com
Wed Jul 19 22:40:47 EDT 2017

: On 19 July 2017 at 21:19, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

But the premise is wrong too. Those hypothetical people don't turn their Macs on in sequence, each person turning their computer on only after the previous person's Mac had finished booting. They effectively boot them up in parallel but offset, spread out over a 24 hour period, so about 3472 people booting up at the same time each minute of the day. Time savings for parallel processes don't add in the way Jobs adds them, if we treat this as 1440 parallel processes (one per minute of the day) we save 1440 hours a year.

Ah, but the relevant unit here is person-hours, not hours: Jobs is claiming that each Mac user loses X% of their life to boot times, and then adds all those slices of life together into N lifetimes (which again, are counted in person-years, not years).

It's still wrong, though: longer boot times actually increase the proportion of your life spent in meaningful activity (e.g. going to the canteen and talking to someone).

-[]z.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list