Why is python so much slower on windows?

Question

I learned about pystones today and so I decided to see what my various environments were like. I ran pystones on my laptop that is running windows on the bare metal and got

Answer 1

Benchmark your startup, but there are just simply some slow modules to initialize on windows. A tiny hack that saves me a second on startup every time:

import os
import mimetypes #mimetypes gets imported later in dep chain

if __name__ == "__main__":
   # stub this out, so registry db wont ever be read, not needed
   mimetypes._winreg = None

Another source of slowness is, multiple standard library modules compile and cache their regexes at import time. re.compile just looks like its slow on windows