FWIW, the 2.4 to 2.5 timing difference came from renaming __len__ to 
__length_hint__.  This was at Guido's request so that the value of bool
(iter(obj)) would always be True.  The consequence of the change was 
that we lost the fast slot lookup for __len__ and instead have to do a 
dictionary based attribute lookup.

For the most part, I don't care about the overhead as it is constant.  
The inner-loop cost dominates.  If you do care, the choices are to add 
some ugly, hackish specific type checks to bypass the attribute lookup 
in cases like generator objects where we know the type is absent.  A 
more general, cleaner solution is to add a new slot for a length hint.  
Personally, I would rather leave this as is and live with the small 
constant lookup time.  If you concur, please close this report.  If 
not, please submit a patch for adding a new slot (model the code after 
that in PyObject_Size()).