[Spambayes] Re: [Python-Dev] Re: some preliminary timings

[Neale Pickett]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

> The issue seems to be that a moderately sized application takes a long
> time to start, right?  How much of the user+sys time was user, how
> much was sys?  Have you used python -v to see which modules it
> imports?
>
> Long ago I knew Hammie; I believe it reads a possibly large database.
> How much time does opening +closing the database take?  (I presume
> that the 46 messages/second was not opening the database afresh for
> each message.)

Hammie's since been modified to use a Berkeley database (bsddb3), so
there's very little penalty associated with the database at startup time
AFAICT.  The constant pickling and unpickling of objects may incur some
penalty, but I don't think it would account for such a drastic slowdown.

Experience (and Tim ;) has tought me not to trust intuition, though.  I
have very little experience performance tuning Python apps thus far, so
I need to defer to someone else to devise an adequate test of the speed
hit from pickling.  Surely someone's considered using the profiler,
right?

Neale