Cobbler 1.6 includes performance enhancements as well as the support for searching from within its API.  Currently to lookup system records and profiles we load all of them over xmlrpc and then search their attributes.  This is expensive and we need to switch to the new search API:

https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/cobbler/2009-March/003169.html

import xmlrpclib
s = xmlrpclib.Server("http://127.0.0.1/cobbler_api")
print s.find_distro({"name":"a*"},False)                           # get 
all distro /names/ starting with a
print s.find_distro({"kernel":"/mnt*"},False )                    # get