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I recall that Mercurial was really fighting their Python test harness. It essentially would startup a new Python process for each test. At 10ms per, it added up to something significant, given their volume of work to cover something as complicated as SCM.

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10ms?

Did they have like 100k tests?

Found a 2014 thread where 10-18% of the test harness time was spent booting the interpreter for the 13,000 required instances. The deeper thread was showing some 500-700 seconds of test time was just the interpreter overhead. The original point of the article was how much worse the overhead was in Python3 vs Python2.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-May/134528...

That's a lot more extreme than 10ms and yea I get your point better now

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