I have installed pytz (v2013.8, but it happens in 2013.b, 2011k) in a virtualenv. The first call to
pytz.timezone("US/Eastern")
takes about 4 seconds. In a regular environment this is essentially instantaneous.
Does anyone have a trick to get this to run faster?
I actually came across the answer by playing around and looking at the source code. Since it gets its timezone settings from within the egg and the first call to timezone has to check that all the timezone files exist, the first call could be slow depending on how the os has to find those files. If pytz is installed using apt-get install python-tz
then then call hits uncompressed files and is very fast. If it is installed using easy_install pytz
then it hits one compressed file over and over again and is slower.
So the solution is to uncompress it. Luckily pip has a handy command.
tl;dr
pip unzip pytz
It seems like in Windows just delete pytz-2013.9-py2.7.egg
I had a hard time running
pip unzip pytz
as it says it cannot find the package. A workaround that I found which works was to edit the setup.py file and replacing
zip_safe=False
. (Set it to False). Then run the installer again:
python setup.py install
This solved my issue of slow loading time as well.