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eviks • yesterday at 9:54 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> Every code path you don’t have is a code path you don’t wait for.

No, every code path you don't execute is that. Like

> No .egg support.

How does that explain anything if the egg format is obsolete and not used?

Similar with spec strictness fallback logic - it's only slow if the packages you're installing are malformed, otherwise the logic will not run and not slow you down.

And in general, instead of a list of irrelevant and potentially relevant things would be great to understand some actual time savings per item (at least those that deliver the most speedup)!

But otherwise great and seemingly comprehensive list!

Replies

zahlman • yesterday at 10:43 PM

> No, every code path you don't execute is that.

Even in compiled languages, binaries have to get loaded into memory. For Python it's much worse. On my machine:

  $ time python -c 'pass'

  real 0m0.019s
  user 0m0.013s
  sys 0m0.006s

  $ time pip --version > /dev/null

  real 0m0.202s
  user 0m0.182s
  sys 0m0.021s
Almost all of that extra time is either the module import process or garbage collection at the end. Even with cached bytecode, the former requires finding and reading from literally hundreds of files, deserializing via `marshal.loads` and then running top-level code, which includes creating objects to represent the functions and classes.

It used to be even worse than this; in recent versions, imports related to Requests are deferred to the first time that an HTTPS request is needed.

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