Shared memory python between two separate shell-launched processes

[Charles Fox (Sheffield)]

Hi guys,
I'm working on debugging a large python simulation which begins by
preloading a huge cache of data.  I want to step through code on many
runs to do the debugging.   Problem is that it takes 20 seconds to
load the cache at each launch.  (Cache is a dict in a 200Mb cPickle
binary file).

So speed up the compile-test cycle I'm thinking about running a
completely separate process (not a fork, but a processed launched form
a different terminal) that can load the cache once then dunk it in an
area of shareed memory.    Each time I debug the main program, it can
start up quickly and read from the shared memory instead of loading
the cache itself.

But when I look at posix_ipc and POSH it looks like you have to fork
the second process from the first one, rather than access the shared
memory though a key ID as in standard C unix shared memory.  Am I
missing something?   Are there any other ways to do this?

thanks,
Charles