Speeding up test debugging when loading large module (ArcPy) as part of program?

Question

I'm using PyScripter to do some python geocoding automation and I'm coming across the situation where I am waiting several tens of seconds for a large module to be imported.

This is very inconvenient since it makes editing and debugging much slower than could be.

I'm hoping there would be a workaround where this large module could be saved in memory so that after the first run, consecutive re-runs wouldn't need to reload the module.

Does such a workaround exist?

I found this Importing arcpy on application launch to speed up subsequent arcpy methods. However it doesn't seem to directly address what I'm experiencing, or perhaps I do not understand the answer.

If someone could clarify the answer or suggest a workaround that would be great!

The code in question is this:

import arcpy

#use arcpy stuff

Answer 1

The arcpy package is less of package of python scripts and more of an API into ArcGIS. So when you import arcpy it takes a long time to load because it is basically opening up a GUIless version of the desktop application. So however long it takes to open up ArcGIS is how long to load the arcpy package.

So the easiest way to speed up anything arcpy related is to run it from within Arc Map. There are two main ways that you can do this. Either turn the script into a geoprocessing tool or to load it into the python window inside of Arc Map. This does remove the ability to run tests from the command line, but if you adapt your scripts to run inside Arc Map you would have the speed increase that you want.