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r61009 on the 2.5 branch
 - Bug #1389051, 1092502: fix excessively large memory allocations when
 calling .read() on a socket object wrapped with makefile(). 
causes a regression compared to 2.4.5 and 2.5.2:
When reading from urllib2 file descriptor, python will read the data a
byte at a time regardless of how much you ask for. python versions up to
2.5.2 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.