written on March 01, 2009
I hate the stdlib. There! I said
it. Why do I hate it? Cookie, cgi, urllib, n'uff said. Today I can
add another module to the “I hate you” list.
I noticed that Werkzeug's
SharedDataMiddleware was just delivering 50 requests a second. I tried
around a bit but nothing changed. Until I removed the call to
mimetypes.guess_type. Suddenly I got 500 requests the second instead
of the previous 50.
How badly implemented can that function be I was asking myself. So I had a look:
def guess_type(url, strict=True):
init()
return guess_type(url, strict)
WTF? And then it hit me. init() was loading the mimetype database and
monkey patching the module so that guess_type() was replaced by a new
function. Actually a method of the mimetype database.
And I was importing guess_type as follows:
from mimetypes import guess_type
So on every call the database was reloaded. GNAAAaa. So check out If you're doing the same mistake. If yes, change it to the following import:
import mimetypes
And now I file a ticket in the Python bug tracker ticket filed. -.-