Performance: jupyter_server.serverapp import takes over 2 seconds, impacting programmatic server discovery

[GitHub4LP]

The import of jupyter_server.serverapp module takes an unexpectedly long time (over 2 seconds in our testing), which significantly impacts applications that need to programmatically discover running Jupyter servers.

from jupyter_server import serverapp

[shreve]

This is a pretty difficult challenge to address because the ServerApp is the main object of jupyter_server, and it needs a lot of other imports. There are a few tiny improvements that can be made (I was able to shave <5% off) but much beyond that would require quite a large restructuring.

Could you say more about your use case where 2 seconds is burdensome?

On my machine, I was measuring from 0.4-0.2s to import using:

python -X importtime -c "import jupyter_server.serverapp"