dict.__init__() and dict.update() with a positional argument look up the "keys" attribute of the argument to distinguish a mapping from a sequence of item-value pairs. It has a non-trivial cost. Merging dicts is optimized for exact dicts in PyDict_Merge(), so it would be worth to optimize also this check.

$ ./python -m pyperf timeit -s "d = {}; D = dict" -- "D(d)"
Unpatched:  Mean +- std dev: 154 ns +- 4 ns
Patched:    Mean +- std dev: 110 ns +- 4 ns

$ ./python -m pyperf timeit -s "d = {}" -- "d.update(d)"
Unpatched:  Mean +- std dev: 112 ns +- 3 ns
Patched:    Mean +- std dev: 70.4 ns +- 1.5 ns

The cost of the check is about 40 ns, and it is a significant part of the total time of creating/updating a small dict.

New changeset f163aeaa8c15b806b622c9cb10bc1d2a6e034e24 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch 'master':
bpo-38219: Optimize dict creating and updating by a dict. (GH-16268)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/f163aeaa8c15b806b622c9cb10bc1d2a6e034e24