I wonder how much can be saved by using a local file system for imports though. In my testing just a mere presense of a home directory on NFS already dramatically slows down imports (by ~10x) due to Python searching for modules in home directory too by default.
to prevent this, set PYTHONNOUSERSITE=1 will prevent searching for modules in ~/.local/ (for convenience, try calling python through a wrapper in your project, say bin/run-python, and there you can set all the python-specific environment variables you need, set at the time of execution and not have to worry about setting them in the user's shell etc)
Thanks, yeah I know that it works, what I meant is that it may be quite easy to compare the module import times with and without that env variable to see how much impact an NFS home directory has (and it's a lot), and possibly draw similar conclusions about the distributed file system behaviour in general too