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.).
Something's missing from your premise--I've never seen some "more-or-less" basic modules take over a second to import, and I'm not running Python on what I would call cutting-edge hardware.  Either you're running on some seriously old hardware, or you're running on an overloaded machine, or either your OS or Python installation is broken in some way.  Or you're not really importing "basic" modules.
If it's any of the first three issues, you need to look at the root problem for a solution.  If it's the last, we really need to know what the specific packages are to be of any help.
Speeding up the python "import" loader