Yeah this is one of my longstanding annoyances with Python... the interpreter is quite slow to start up because every import generates a ton of stat() calls. Moreover, there is a tendency to use a very long PYTHONPATH, which increases the number of stats.

It's basically doing random access I/O (the slowest thing your computer can do) proportional to (large constant factor) * (num imports in program) * (length of PYTHONPATH).

When you can use it, a shebang of

#!/usr/bin/python -S

can speed things up substantially.

Perl starts up an order of magnitude faster too (more like 3ms than 30ms). Ruby seems to have the same problem as Python.