Please find the attached ceval.c.  This file was generated from oprofile
and gives clear indicators where the simple program below gets hung up.

You will find in the oprofile output, from ceval.c, that PyEval_Frame
has a total of 1649 26.2789.  This indicates with a high degree of
probabilty that the changes made in this portion of the code are
promblamatic.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am by no means a C programmer;
however, I can tell you that the code has changed a great deal with
regards to xmlrpc and it has impacted performance to the point where it
seems to be unusable with current releases of Python where expected
output is > 300 records.  

Please check it out for yourself, using a different xmlrpc server - I
currently have access to one only where the number of records is greater
than 300.