[Python-Dev] Issue #11051: system calls per import

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Another thing to consider: on App Engine (which despite of all its
> architectural weirdness uses a -- mostly -- standard Linux filesystem
> for the Python code of the app) someone measured that importing from a
> zipfile is much faster than importing from the filesystem. I would
> imagine this extends to other contexts too, and it makes sense because
> the zipfile directory gets cached in memory so no stat() calls are
> necessary.

Of course, you can't know until you measure, and then you only know
about the specific case.

However, I think you can't really compare zip reading with directory
reading - I'd expect that reading a zip directory is signficantly faster
than reading the directory contents of the zip file unpacked, just
because this is so many fewer layers of indirection.

Regards,
Martin