cPickle asymptotic performance?

[Eric Jonas]

Hello, 

I've done some benchmarking while attempting to serialize my (large)
graph data structure with cPickle; I'm seeing superlinear performance
(plotting it seems to suggest n^2 where n is the number of nodes of my
graph), in the duration of the pickle.dump calls and I can't quite
figure out why. The connectivity of the graph is such that the number of
nodes is ~ number of edges, so I don't think this is a problem of edge
count secretly growing > O(n). Is cPickle's behavior known to be O(n^2)?
Does anyone have any generic tips for speeding up cPickle? 
	
Thanks, 
		...Eric