So yes, we have some code that was doing, roughly:
if any(fnmatchcase(key, pat) for pat in pattern):
   refs.add(key)
on 200-300 elements, a lot.  That said, many of them were not globs so we've worked around this to only use fnmatchcase on globs and just key in set otherwise.  Things are now usable on python 2.6.6+ (so Ubuntu 10.10) and noise otherwise.