Also of course, like any other language, Python is not immune to I/O wait. Recently I was using Python to do some low level audio processing (nothing fancy) and

Also of course, like any other language, Python is not immune to I/O wait. Recently I was using Python to do some low level audio processing (nothing fancy) and wondering why it was taking so long to process such a small file. Turns out the "wave" stream reader I was using isn't internally buffered, like most of the normal file readers are, so each single-byte read was making the round trip to disk. Simply reading the whole file in one go sped up the program's execution more than 10x. I like to think I've been doing this long enough to not make such silly mistakes, but when you're focused on a totally different area of the problem, things like this are still quite easy to miss.