Re: Basic import Questions (with bonus profiling question)

Gregory Piñero wrote:

1. Will "from somemodule import onething" take as long to start up as
import somemodule?

yes; "from x import y" does an ordinary import of "x" under the hood.

2. Is there anyway I can get at onething more quickly?

not really, unless you're willing/able to refactor the module you're importing.

3. If I put an import statement hidden away in some function, will
Python only do the import when that function is called?

correct. "import" is an executable statement.

If I say, never use that function would that import statement affect
> performance at all?

nope.

Ultimately I have IIS running python as a CGI script and it seems to
just be taking many seconds to load a small page. I'm guessing the
issue is starting up the interpreter and loading all the modules.

several seconds? sounds bad. what does the following script print on your machine?

import time, subprocess, sys

t0 = time.time()
for i in range(10):
subprocess.call([sys.executable, "-c", "pass"])
print time.time() - t0

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