I do not think there are any unwanted side-effects, the get_tracker method is called for each request to the tracker and returns an initialized tracker object which is discarded after the request.

In the first call in __init__ there is no request but that's fine.

The noteable side-effect of that call is pulling in all the imports *and* initializing all the detectors and actions. Which in the timetracker case is more than a second that is *not* seen by the first real request.