The Setup That Revealed the Gap
I needed to set up a Python project on three different machines in one morning — my laptop, a CI runner, and a fresh cloud VM. Same requirements.txt, same Python 3.11, wildly different install times. On the VM, pip install took 4 minutes 32 seconds. With uv, the same dependencies installed in 18 seconds.
That's not a typo. The 15x speedup made me question whether I'd been doing dependency management wrong for years.
This post walks through what actually happens when you run pip install, why Poetry adds overhead, and why uv — a Rust-based installer released in 2023 — is changing the game for beginners who just want their code to run without waiting.
What pip Does Under the Hood (And Why It's Slow)
When you run pip install requests, here's the actual sequence:
- Resolve dependency graph (requests → urllib3, charset-normalizer, certifi, idna)
- Download
.whlfiles from PyPI for each package - Extract wheels (which are just ZIP files)
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