> now thats interesting:
> adding the line "sock.setsockopt(SOL_TCP, TCP_NODELAY, 1) " decreased
> the delay by half. It still is extremely high but it's a start.

Did you do it on both the client and server sockets?

> Would be interesting to examine the differences between the Perl
> wrapper and the Python wrapper to figure out why Perl "does the right
> thing" in this case and Python doesn't.

Perhaps the Perl wrapper is less thin as the Python one. In any case,
it's by design if the Python socket wrapper doesn't try to be "smart":
the intent is to provide an access to the C API and let people do what
they want with it. Smart things are relegated to higher-level modules or
libraries.