On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:27 PM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > Phillip J. Eby wrote: >> Note by the way that "scan all these ZIP files" is a misleading >> term in any >> case - the files are not "scanned". They are opened, and a small >> amount of >> data is read from the end of the file. Nothing that I would consider >> "scanning" is involved. > > The data read from the end of the file is the directory > which is decoded using marshal functions. You normally > call this scanning data. > > Like Martin said: you always have to read the whole ZIP > directory - even if you're just interested in a single > module with the file. > > Actually loading the module then requires decompressing > the code which takes a whole lot longer than just reading > a file from the file system.
Last I checked, CPUs and RAM are a lot faster than disk. Unless it's sitting in cache already, reading a zip should be way faster than reading an uncompressed file. On top of that, I don't think egg zips are compressed by default... -bob _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
