As seen on comp.lang.python...

"Steven Atkinson" <sja / san.rr.com> wrote in message
news:<rbH49.66567$Jz.12415031 / twister.socal.rr.com>...
> I'm trying to settle on Ruby or Python as my scripting language of 
> choice. There are some features of Ruby that I like, but I lean toward

> Python since by day I'm a C++ programmer and Python seems more natural

> to me. Unfortunately, in my first side by side test I discovered a 
> _huge_ performance difference (at least for what I wanted to do). I 
> need a simple program that can clean out some tool generated source 
> code. I'm recursively searching 100's (probably close to or slightly 
> over a 1000) directories searching for certain file extensions (*_i.c,

> *_p.c,*.thi, *.thl) and then removing them. The Ruby version runs in 
> about 20-30 seconds. The Python version takes 2-3 minutes! My feeling 
> is that it's probably just the os.path.walk library routine is slow 
> (only on NT, haven't tried on Linux. Maybe that's a good sanity 
> check.). So before I dig into the code to determine why it's so slow 
> I'd like to know if others experience slowness with Python overall, 
> just the os.path.walk routine, only the NT version.
> 
> I'll probably need to do lots of directory searching in future 
> scripts, so I'd like that to be reasonably fast. Granted I could write

> my own extension, or maybe call the Win32 functions directly since the

> code does not need to be portable, but I'd rather not do that.