(This applies to all versions of Python I investigated, although the attached patch is for Python 2.7)

I wondered why import uuid took so long, so I did some profiling.

It turns out that find_library wastes at lot of time because of this crazy regular expression in _findSoname_ldconfig.

A quick look at the ldconfig source (namely, the print_cache routine which is invoked when you call ldconfig -p, http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=elf/cache.c#l127) confirmed my suspicion that the ldconfig's output could easily be parsed without such a regex monster.

I attached two patches that fix this problem. Choose one! ;-)

The ctypes tests pass with my fixes, and here comes some benchmarking:

$ cat benchmark_ctypes.py 
from ctypes.util import find_library
for i in xrange(10):
  for lib in ['mm', 'c', 'bz2', 'uuid']:
    find_library(lib)

# Current implementation
$ time python benchmark_ctypes.py
real 0m11.813s
...
$ time python -c 'import uuid'
real 0m0.625s
...

# With my patch applied
$ cp /tmp/ctypesutil.py ctypes/util.py
$ time python benchmark_ctypes.py
real 0m1.785s
...
$ time python -c 'import uuid'
real 0m0.182s
...

(might also be related to http://bugs.python.org/issue11063)

Here is the first patch adapted for py3k.

Actually, re.escape is probably still needed around name.

Thanks for the new patch. Looking again, I wonder if there's a reason the original regexp was so complicated. ldconfig output here has lines such as:

libBrokenLocale.so.1 (libc6,x86-64, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /lib64/libBrokenLocale.so.1
libBrokenLocale.so.1 (libc6, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /lib/libBrokenLocale.so.1
libBrokenLocale.so (libc6,x86-64, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /usr/lib64/libBrokenLocale.so
libBrokenLocale.so (libc6, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /usr/lib/libBrokenLocale.so

Ideally we would factor out the parsing to a separate private function, and have tests for it.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter.

We're looking for the part after the => in any case - ignoring the ABI/architecture information - so the regex would chose the first of those entries.

Ok, I think you're right.
I've committed the patch to 3.3 in r88639 after having added a minimal test. Is there a full name I should credit?
Thank you for contributing!

Reopening and reverted the commit in r88640. The patch changes behaviour by turning the previous unrooted filename ('libc.so.6') into a full path ('/lib64/libc.so.6'). This breaks builds where multiple versions of a library are available and only one is loadable, e.g. 32-bit builds on 64-bit machines:

======================================================================
ERROR: test_load (ctypes.test.test_loading.LoaderTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home2/buildbot2/slave/hg-3.x.loewis-parallel/build/Lib/ctypes/test/test_loading.py", line 26, in test_load
    CDLL(libc_name)
  File "/home2/buildbot2/slave/hg-3.x.loewis-parallel/build/Lib/ctypes/__init__.py", line 340, in __init__
    self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode)
OSError: /lib64/libc.so.6: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Humm. Would be great to have the ldconfig -p output of such a machine... I can't get ldconfig to recognize 64-bit libraries on my 32-bit machines, so I have no output to test against...

Here is an excerpt:

libc.so.6 (libc6,x86-64, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /lib64/libc.so.6
libc.so.6 (libc6, OS ABI: Linux 2.6.9) =\> /lib/libc.so.6

The "OS ABI" thing is not always there:

libdrm.so.2 (libc6,x86-64) =\> /usr/lib64/libdrm.so.2
libdrm.so.2 (libc6) =\> /usr/lib/libdrm.so.2

As you see, there are two of them with the same name but in a different path. If you return the absolute path, there is a 50% possibility that you are returning the wrong one ;)

There seem to be two key differences between the original implementation and yours:

• the orig impl matches the abi_type at the beginning of the parentheses, yours simply ignores the abi_type (that should have caught my eye, but that regex looked so much like magic that I didn't try to make sense of it :-))
• the orig impl returns the file name from the beginning of the matched line, yours returns the full path from the end of the line

I guess it should be doable to retain the speed benefit while implementing a matching algorithm closer to the original one.

the orig impl matches the abi_type at the beginning of the parentheses,
yours simply ignores the abi_type (that should have caught my eye, but that
regex looked so much like magic that I didn't try to make sense of it :-))

Same here. :)

The version I attached seems to work for me. It's some kind of compromise -- basically it's the original regex but with the unneccessary, performance-decreasing cruft stripped away.

btw, "Jonas H." is perfectly fine - I don't care about being honored, I just want to import uuid without waiting forever. :-)

*push* Any way to get this into the codebase?

New changeset 19d9f0a177de by Antoine Pitrou in branch 'default':
Issue bpo-11258: Speed up ctypes.util.find_library() under Linux by a factor
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/19d9f0a177de

I committed a modified patch. Hopefully the buildbots won't break this time :)

19d9f0a177de causes that test_ctypes hangs when test suite is run in Gentoo sandbox. Please reopen this issue.

$ sandbox python3.3 -B -m test.regrtest --timeout=10 -v test_ctypes
== CPython 3.3a0 (default:020ebe0be33e+, Apr 24 2011, 17:52:58) [GCC 4.5.2]
==   Linux-${version}
==   /tmp/test_python_23902
Testing with flags: sys.flags(debug=0, inspect=0, interactive=0, optimize=0, dont_write_bytecode=1, no_user_site=0, no_site=0, ignore_environment=0, verbose=0, bytes_warning=0, quiet=0)
[1/1] test_ctypes
Timeout (0:00:10)!
Thread 0x00007fc205f54700:
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/subprocess.py", line 466 in _eintr_retry_call
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/subprocess.py", line 1412 in _execute_child
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/subprocess.py", line 766 in __init__
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/ctypes/util.py", line 198 in _findSoname_ldconfig
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/ctypes/util.py", line 206 in find_library
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/ctypes/test/test_find.py", line 15 in <module>
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/ctypes/test/__init__.py", line 64 in get_tests
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/test_ctypes.py", line 11 in test_main
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/regrtest.py", line 1094 in runtest_inner
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/regrtest.py", line 887 in runtest
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/regrtest.py", line 587 in _runtest
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/regrtest.py", line 711 in main
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/test/regrtest.py", line 1672 in <module>
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/runpy.py", line 73 in _run_code
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.3/runpy.py", line 160 in _run_module_as_main

19d9f0a177de causes that test_ctypes hangs when test suite is run in
Gentoo sandbox. Please reopen this issue.

I'd prefer having a separate issue (which you already opened :-)).
The fact that all buildbots work fine after the change suggests to me
that the issue is not really the patch I committed.

OK. We will use issue bpo-11915.