hardy regression: reading from a urllib2 file descriptor happens byte-at-a-time

Binary package hint: python2.5

Hi,

When reading from urllib2 file descriptor, python2.5 in hardy will
read the data a byte at a time regardless of how much you ask for.
python2.4 will read the data in 8K chunks.

This has enough of a performance impact that it increases download
time for a large file over a gigabit LAN from 10 seconds to 34
minutes. (!)

Trivial/obvious example code:

    f = urllib2.urlopen("http://launchpadlibrarian.net/13214672/nexuiz-data_2.4.orig.tar.gz")
    while 1:
   chunk = f.read()

... and then strace it to see the recv()'s chugging along, one byte at
a time.

--
James