I'm getting seriously frustrated at how slow python startup is.  Just importing more or less basic modules takes a second, since python runs down the sys.path looking for matching files (and generating 4 stat() calls - ["foo", "foo.py", "foo.pyc", "foo.so"] - for each check).  For a complicated project environment, with tons of different directories, this can take around 5 seconds -- all to run a script that might fail instantly.
Do folks have suggestions for how to speed up this process?  For instance, one hack I've seen is to set the LD_PRELOAD_32 environment variable to a library that caches the result of ENOENT calls (e.g. failed stat() calls) between runs.  Of course, this has all sorts of problems (potentially confusing non-python programs, negative caching, etc.).
The first things that come to mind are: 

Try a smaller path
Make sure your modules are pyc's so they'll load faster
Make sure you don't double import, or import too much

Other than that, are you sure that the disk operations are what's bogging you down? Is your disk/operating system really busy or old and slow? 
Maybe a defrag is in order?
Speeding up the python "import" loader