[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Paul Moore wrote:
> It's a long time ago, and back prior to PEP 302, but I believe that
> the original version of the zipimport PEP (PEP 273 by Jim Ahlstrom)
> included some timings based on the original patch. While this did show
> slowdowns with compressed zip files, it showed distinct speedups with
> *un*compressed zip files. IIRC, this was explained as because a
> zipfile directory scan is faster than multiple filesystem stats.

This all is convincing *if* the files you are looking for actually
are located in the zipfile - then reading from the zipfile might
indeed be faster than directly reading from disk.

If, however, the files are *not* in the zipfile, it's not so
clear anymore what the consequences are. On the downside, you
have the need to read the entire zip table-of-content (TOC),
and you have the need to perform a dictionary lookup. On the
up-side, you avoid a system call.

Regards,
Martin