[Python-Dev] shared data (was: Some thoughts on the codecs...)

[Greg Stein]

On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>...
> > The problem with these large tables is that currently
> > Python modules are not shared among processes since
> > every process builds its own table.
> > 
> > Static C data has the advantage of being shareable at
> > the OS level.
> 
> Don't worry about it.  128K is too small to care, I think...

This is the reason Python starts up so slow and has a large memory
footprint. There hasn't been any concern for moving stuff into shared data
pages. As a result, a process must map in a bunch of vmem pages, for no
other reason than to allocate Python structures in that memory and copy
constants in.

Go start Perl 100 times, then do the same with Python. Python is
significantly slower. I've actually written a web app in PHP because
another one that I did in Python had slow response time.
[ yah: the Real Man Answer is to write a real/good mod_python. ]

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/