Linux/NT python startup speed

[Johannes Stezenbach]

Niklas Frykholm <r2d2 at mao.acc.umu.se> wrote:
>Can someone explain this difference. (The processor on the Linux system is
>certainly not 40 times faster.)

This was discussed here a few months ago. The reason for the slow
startup is the winsound module (source: PC/winsound.c) which is
unnecessarily a builtin.  winsound causes Python to load the
Windows multimedia DLLs, which can be slow if your sound drivers
make it so.

Two solutions were discussed:
a) make winsound a .pyd
b) use some obscure "delayload" feature of the M$ linker. There
   is a ready to use python15.dll for Python 1.5.2 with this
   feature somewhere out there (I don't remember where, though,
   since I use Linux now)

IMHO solution a) should be standard in Python 1.6 (it isn't in
1.6a2).

Johannes