Skip Montanaro writes: > "Instant" for me is "the blink of an eye," which Wikipedia reports as > typically between 100ms and 400ms. > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink> If you blink, you've missed > Python 2.7 startup on a relatively modern machine.
This is what I see for Mac OS X "Mavericks" on a 2.7GHz Core i7: # Apple's /usr/bin/python, Python 2.7.5, built with clang 5.0.0 $ time python -c "" # cold warm warm real 0.967s 0.020s 0.022s user 0.025s 0.011s 0.012s sys 0.061s 0.009s 0.007s # MacPorts /opt/local/bin/python3.3, Python 3.3.5, same compiler $ time python3.3 -c "" real 1.034s 0.041s 0.037s user 0.065s 0.030s 0.028s sys 0.036s 0.008s 0.007s Further iterations of warm cache starts remain (coincidentally, I would guess, but it's indicative) in the ranges above. I don't feel like rebooting or otherwise figuring out how to evict python from the cache to get a sense of variation for cold cache startup, but obviously it's more than an order of magnitude slower than warm start for both Pythons. Warm start numbers are well within Daniel's "50ms" spec. Granted user time for Python 3.3 is 2.5-3X that of Python 2.7 warm or cold, it's still below human JND (if you can see it, it's probably a slow display ;-). So it's all about waiting on the OS, it seems to me. By comparison, git: $ time git --version # cold warm warm real 0.430s 0.017s 0.021s user 0.007s 0.006s 0.006s sys 0.009s 0.006s 0.006s OK, Python 2.7 is slower than git and Python 3.3 much slower. But I don't think this explains anybody's feeling that hg is sluggish compared to git -- git also shows perceptible delay on a cold start, I didn't notice it being faster (I wasn't thinking about it, though, and I wasn't in a hurry to see the version string). I suspect Linus has spiked everybody's Kool-Aid and it's a mass hallucination. More seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if git is just better optimized for certain operations that people expect to be fast. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com