Comment 6 for bug 207604

Hi!

This is somewhat related to the problem we have with pytz in Google App Engine. Because of the environment constraints and the short-lived runtime instances, initializing pytz takes an unreasonable amount of time in App Engine. Most of this is because pytz/__init__.py checks for 500+ timezone files when it is simply imported (this alone takes between 0.15 and 0.40 seconds in Google's server).

I wish those checkings were lazy, so that we could implement an alternative approach to check the available time zones. The way it is, we need to patch pytz to use in App Engine.

I started a project to provide a pytz version tuned for App Engine via monkeypatch, but realized that it'd be impossible to make it without actually patching __init__. The result is here:

http://code.google.com/p/gae-pytz/

Please let me know if I can help.