Upon first access, python compiles .py code into bytecode and stores it in .pyc files. Subsequent uses of those python sources are read from the .pyc files without needing to re-compile. This make startup time, but not runtime, faster.
But what about read-only filesystems? If python is running on a read-only filesystem no .pyc files are written and every use of a .py file involves compiling the code afresh. Everything works, the startup time of a script is just a little slower.
Read-only filesystems within a container are a security best practice in production environments. Often in kubernetes deployment manifests you might see something like:
securityContext:
readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
And if you’re running python only once within the container, the container has a little bit of overhead at startup as it compiles into bytecode and then everything is in memory and off it goes. But if you’re running python multiple times, or want to make even the single run start faster, we can pre-compile the code when we build the container with the built-in python compileall library.
# Compile code on sys.path (includes system packages and CWD):
RUN python -c "import compileall; compileall.compile_path(maxlevels=10)"
# Compile code in a directory:
RUN python -m compileall /path/to/code
This moves the compilation overhead to the container build where it happens once, and out of the startup.
Thanks to Itamar Turner-Trauring at https://pythonspeed.com/ for their excellent Production-ready Docker packaging for Python slide deck with this gem.
Digital Ramblings 