Expensiveness of searching load-path

My XEmacs packages are installed on a Linux machine. Those packages are used from both Linux and from Solaris. The Linux NFS server is notoriously slow. Each find-file of a C source file on Solaris was annoyingly slow. I tracked it down to this ancient code in one of my cc-mode hooks: (ignore-errors (require 'cc-lobotomy) ...) There is no such .el file on my load-path, so a full load-path search was performed for every find-file. Anyways, the search of my load-path executes 158 stats, and takes anywhere from 3-12 seconds, averaging around 5 seconds. This is on fast machines with an unloaded network. Many of us on xemacs-beta are using XEmacs with all files on local disk. In the real world, XEmacs is much more likely to be housed on NFS-mounted filesystems on an overloaded network. We should work under the assumption that the price of the current load-path layout is TEN SECONDS in startup time. This is too expensive. Martin