import timing

[mih]

For things like the CLI fast startup times are important, but also our trajectory to more parallelization puts more and more weight on this. At the moment a plain import datalad takes roughly ~200ms. Here are some stats on the timing of the underlying imports on my system (indentation indicates nesting of imports):

import time: self [us] | cumulative | imported package
...
import time:     29374 |      62753 | site
...
import time:      3070 |      10495 |                   datalad.support.exceptions
import time:      1218 |      13583 |                 datalad.dochelpers
...
import time:      2706 |      21275 |                 datalad.utils
import time:       633 |      35489 |               datalad.runner.utils
import time:       544 |      87447 |             datalad.runner.protocol
import time:      2809 |      90256 |           datalad.runner.coreprotocols
...
import time:        66 |      94285 |       datalad.runner.gitrunner
import time:       715 |      94999 |     datalad.consts
...
import time:      2531 |     122479 |   datalad.config
...
import time:      2222 |      36829 |   datalad.log
import time:     63481 |     232323 | datalad

So half of it is initializing the config.

It would make sense to explore the newly established possibilities with the DATALAD_RUNTIME_LIBRARYMODE flag.