[Python-Dev] Issue #11051: system calls per import

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:08:25 -0800
Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 
> (Basically I am biased to believe that stat() is a pretty slow system
> call -- this may just be old NFS lore though.)

I don't know about NFS, but starting a Python interpreter located on a
Samba share from a Windows VM is quite slow too.
I think Martin is right for the common case: on a local filesystem on a
modern Unix, stat() is certainly very fast. Remote or
distributed filesystems seem to be more of a problem.

Regards

Antoine.