Speed quirk: redundant line gives six-fold speedup

[Mark Dickinson]

In article <mailman.3521.1124991042.10512.python-list at python.org>, Bill 
Mill <bill.mill at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of my own: what in the world made you think "maybe I'll add 29
> dummy global variables to speed things up?"

You mean this isn't a well-known optimization technique? :)

I was refactoring the code, and after making a particular function
redundant I noticed that removing the code for that function produced
the slow down described.  Then I naturally experimented to try to figure
out what I had to put back in to recover the original speed.

Not that I really care about the speed itself, but I'd dearly like to
understand what's at work here.

Mark