CPython doesn't seem to have that many knobs... You can tune some settings in GC, and maybe the GIL acquiring interval, but it doesn't seem to produce speedups in most programs.
However, the way you write python code can be tuned a lot. This is actually, at least to an extend, our failure. JIT can make things really fast, but can get confused in places. We're trying to eliminate them as we go, but it can't be always done.
Generators vs list comprehensions. Not using sys._getframe, sys.exc_info, etc. not relying too much on dynamism like passing very general kwargs and *args, the list goes on.
Jitviewer can be a lot of help, but it's a bit buggy and too low level to be seriously recommended.
I'm a bit confused. Which one is faster?
"As of now (Feb 2011) generators are usually slower than corresponding code not using generators. Same goes for generator expressions. For most cases using list comprehension is faster."