Tres Seaver wrote at 2008-8-28 15:22 -0400:
.... I don't think zipped eggs are a win in any real scenario, except possibly the goofy file-count-limited GAE. I would strongly prefer that you revert this one change (you can override it in your own '~/.buildout/default.cfg').
We have observed a drastic speedup (on both Windows and Linux) in import time (about 30 %) when we have put our complete (large) application (consisting among others of Zope 2, CMF, Archetypes) in a (single) zip file. The probably reason: Python's module lookup is very expensive. It makes about 5 pokes on each entry in "sys.path". These become "stat" for directory entries. Looking into an in-memory zip content table is much faster than a filesystem "stat". As the use of eggs drastically increases the number of entries in "sys.path", Python's imports are likely to get slower. However, I am not sure whether our observations for a single large zip (in fact, we use two: one for our application, the other for Python's runtime library) is valid for the case of many small zipped eggs. -- Dieter