On Sun, Nov 05, 2006, "Martin v. L?wis" wrote: > Greg Ewing schrieb: >> Fredrik Lundh wrote: >>> >>> well, from a performance perspective, it would be nice if Python looked >>> for *fewer* things, not more things. >> >> Instead of searching for things by doing a stat call for each >> possible file name, would it perhaps be faster to read the contents >> of all the directories along sys.path into memory and then go >> searching through that? > > That should never be better: the system will cache the directory > blocks, also, and it will do a better job than Python will.
Maybe so, but I recently dealt with a painful bottleneck in Python code caused by excessive stat() calls on a directory with thousands of files, while the os.listdir() function was bogging things down hardly at all. Granted, Python bytecode was almost certainly the cause of much of the overhead, but I still suspect that a simple listing will be faster in C code because of fewer system calls. It should be a matter of profiling before this suggestion is rejected rather than making assertions about what "should" be happening. -- Aahz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax, unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the things I like about it." --Tim Peters on Python, 16 Sep 1993 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
