Comment by SEJeff

This is far and above my favorite post on python wheels from the guy who wrote Flask, bits of Sphinx, and jinja2 to name a few, Armin Ronacher:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/27/python-on-wheels/

I switched our webapp deployment from using sdists from an internal pypi instance (yay cheeseshop!) to using wheels built on the server and the time to install some things such as lxml, or numpy, went from 20 minutes-ish to 20-30 seconds. Python wheels are fantastic.