slowdown on looping

[Trevor Perrin]

After running a simple loop around 100-200 million times, there's a
speed drop of about a factor of 7.  This happens within several
minutes (on a 1.7 Ghz machine), so it's not that hard to see.  I'm
using Python 2.3.2 under Windows.

Is anyone familiar with this?

import time
startTime = time.time()
x = 0
while 1:
    x += 1
    if x % 1000000 == 0:
        endTime = time.time()
        print "time = ", endTime - startTime, x
        startTime = endTime            
               

Trevor