Times I've profiled large tests suites / codebases in the past, this has been entirely down to import overheads. Quite a difficult thing to fix ... I'm hoping

Times I've profiled large tests suites / codebases in the past, this has been entirely down to import overheads. Quite a difficult thing to fix ... I'm hoping this PEP Proposal for lazy imports might solve things: https://peps.python.org/pep-0690/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0690/ Try profiling pytest with something like pyinstrument[1] and make sure you invoke it from python directly[2] with `--collect-only` as an argument. You'll essentially then just be profiling the import overheads before tests are ran. [1] - https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide.html#profile-a-specific-chunk-of-code https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide.html#pro... [2] - https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide.html#profile-a-specific-chunk-of-code https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide.html#pro...