[elevation]

> 40-50x number is more lower bound [...] easily score another order of magnitude slower

This is about what I observe. I had a utility based on `scapy`; there were no obviously bad ideas in the python source, but porting the work loop into a cpython extension module yielded a 500x speedup.

[anitil]

I feel like scapy is a bit of a special case though. It's unusually dynamic because it allows kind of arbitrarily crazy things. I feel like it's maily best for prototyping. I've had 1000x speedups (100s of milliseconds to dozens of microseconds) just by removing dynamism. In our case we used scapy to work out the packet shapes we cared about and then just implemented just that subset (still in Python!). But that dynamism really helped with the early stages along with wireshark