shelve and the best db possible

[Dan Parisien]

I've been using shelve in dbm mode for a while now and Im' having problems. 
Either there are random segfaults or writes take an exponentially longer 
time to do the bigger the db gets (100 rows -> 1 second, 1000 rows -> 20 
seconds, 10000 rows -> 600 seconds then crash)

I really love shelve, but dbm doesn't seem to scale very well :( Could 
anyone point me to a good db with a shelve interface? I've tried to get 
bsddb3 to go, but the test scripts all die :(

Thanks,
Dan