[Python-Dev] The memo of pickle

Greg Ewing greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Thu, 08 Aug 2002 11:51:06 +1200 (NZST)


> I'm not in love with giant pickle memos myself, but to reduce expectations
> closer to reality, note that each dict entry consumes at least 18 bytes (we
> keep the load factor under 2/3, so there's at least one unused entry for
> every two real entries; it's an indirect overhead, but a real one).

Is there perhaps a more memory-efficient data structure that
could be used here instead of a dict? A b-tree, perhaps,
which with a suitable bucket size could use no more than
about 8 byte per entry -- 4 for the object reference and
4 for the integer index that it maps to.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
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