[Python-Dev] Store startup modules as C structures for 20%+ startup speed improvement?

[Carl Shapiro]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 5:55 AM, Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz at gmail.com> wrote:

> During the import process, Python can already deal with folders and .zip
> files in sys.path... now, instead of having special handling for a new
> concept with a custom command line, etc, why not just say that this is a
> special file (e.g.: files with a .pyfrozen extension) and make importlib be
> able to deal with it when it's on sys.path (that way there could be
> multiple of those and there should be no need to turn it on/off, custom
> command line, etc)?
>

That is an interesting idea but it might not be easy to work into this
design.  The improvement in start-up time comes from eliminating the
overheads of filesystem I/O, memory allocation, and un-marshaling
bytecode.  Having this data on the filesystem would reintroduce the cost of
filesystem I/O and it would add a load-time relocation to the equation so
the overall performance benefits would be greatly lessened.


> Another question: doesn't importlib already provide hooks for external
> contributors which could address that use case? (so, this could initially
> be available as a third party library for maturing outside of CPython and
> then when it's deemed to be mature it could be integrated into CPython --
> not that this can't happen on Python 3.8 timeframe, but it'd be useful
> checking its use against the current Python version and measuring benefits
> with real world code).
>

This may be possible but, for the same reasons I outline above, it would
certainly come at the expense of performance.

I think many people are interested in a better .pyc format but our goals
are much more modest.  We are actually trying to not introduce a whole new
way to externalize .py data in CPython.  Rather, we think of this as just
making the existing frozen module capability much faster so its use can be
broadened to making start-up performance better.  The user visible part,
the command line interface to bypass the frozen module, would be a
nice-to-have for developers but is something we could live without.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20180918/b7f4368f/attachment.html>