Presumably an import is no faster or slower than opening a file?

[tinnews at isbd.co.uk]

I'm trying to minimise the overheads of a small Python utility, I'm
not really too fussed about how fast it is but I would like to
minimise its loading effect on the system as it could be called lots
of times (and, no, I don't think there's an easy way of keeping it
running and using the same copy repeatedly).

It needs a configuration file of some sort which I want to keep
separate from the code, is there thus anything to choose between a
configuration file that I read after:-

    f = open("configFile", 'r')

... and importing a configuration written as python dictionaries or
whatever:-

    import myConfig

-- 
Chris Green