[korijn]

Have you established that searching for modules is slow? I think it just takes time to actually process the imported modules and load everything into memory.

[formerly_proven]

On Windows (what with atrocious NTFS performance and all) an interpreter that's using a zipped library is way faster than one using loose modules.

[intrepidhero]

No. In fact my experiments suggest otherwise. That was just where my intuition lead me.