[Python-Dev] python process creation overhead

[Gregory Szorc]

On 5/10/2014 2:46 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:
> Le 10 mai 2014 22:51, "Gregory Szorc" <gregory.szorc at gmail.com 
> <mailto:gregory.szorc at gmail.com>> a écrit :
>> Furthermore, Python 3 appears to be >50% slower than Python 2.
> 
> Please mention the minor version. It looks like you compared 2.7
> and 3.3. Please test 3.4, we made interesting progress on the
> startup time.
> 
> There is still something to do, especially on OS X. Depending on
> the OS, different modules are loaded and some functions are
> implemented differently.

3.4.0 does appear to be faster than 3.3.5 on Linux - `python -c ''` is
taking ~50ms (as opposed to ~60ms) on my i7-2600K. Great to see!

But 3.4.0 is still slower than 2.7.6. And all versions of CPython are
over 3x slower than Perl 5.18.2. This difference amounts to minutes of
CPU time when thousands of processes are involved. That seems
excessive to me.

Why can't Python start as quickly as Perl or Ruby?