Is it possible to fasten the import of cgi?

[Cecil Westerhof]

I have a cgi-script dat uses the modules cgi, os, sys and time. Offcourse I
can not time the time used to import time, but os and sys do not take more
as a millisecond. My script itself takes 3 or 4 milliseconds. But importing
cgi takes 95 milliseconds. (This is on my test system a PII 300 MHz. Is
there a way to make this more fast? The import off cgi makes the script at
least 20 times as slow. Something like mod-python is not a possibility. I
could use it on my test machine, but not at the osting provider.

[Cecil Westerhof]

Gabriel Genellina wrote:

I'll try to explain better: the cgi *protocol* (I'm not talking about the
cgi *module*) requires a *new* python process to be created on *each*
request. Try to measure the time it takes to launch Python, that is, the
time from when you type `python ENTER` on your shell and the interpreter
prompt appears. That time is wasted for *every* cgi request, and I bet it
is much greater than the 95 ms you measure importing a module (be it cgi
or whatever). You'll gain much more responsiveness if you can switch to
another protocol, be it FastCGI, WSGI, mod_python or another.

The import of the cgi module takes about 95 milliseconds and the browsers
takes around 260 milliseconds to fetch the xml-page. This is why I thought
it to be important, but I think you are right, I should not worry about
this and switch to another protocol. Is not possible with the current
hosting provider, but I'll switch.
Pointers where to look for in selecting the protocol are apreciated.

Anyway, comparing the import time between os, sys, and cgi is not very
meaningful. sys is a builtin module, so "import sys" does very little. os
is likely to be already imported by the time your script begins, so
"import os" just verifies that os is already in sys.modules. "import cgi"
is the only example when Python actually has to load something, so it's
not a surprise if it takes longer.

Okay, thank you for the explanation.

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:15:44 -0300, Gabriel Genellina <ga******@yahoo .com.arwrote:
....

I'll try to explain better: the cgi *protocol* (I'm not talking about the
cgi *module*) requires a *new* python process to be created on *each*
request. Try to measure the time it takes to launch Python, that is, the
time from when you type `python ENTER` on your shell and the interpreter
prompt appears.

On my Mac Mini with all of Python on local disk:

tuva:~time python </dev/null
0.024u 0.012s 0:00.02 150.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
tuva:~time python < /dev/null
0.028u 0.004s 0:00.02 100.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
tuva:~>

I.e. about 200--300ms. I assume startup time >shutdown time.

If Python was at the other end of a NFS file system, much worse figures.

/Jorgen

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