Size of dictionary

[Tim Peters]

[Pete Goodeve]
> I'm seeing some rather surprising (to me) behaviour when I save a
> dictionary to a file with cPickle.  When I remove a fraction of the
> existing entries in the dictionary, the size of the saved file can
> *increase* by something like 50%!

Show us the code you use to save the dict to a pickle, including the code
you use to open the file.  Also tell us which version of Python you're
using, and which operating system.

> ...
> I realize this is due to the hashing used,

Nope, pickles don't know anything about dict hashing.

> but it still seems a bit odd.

Yup.