I have a relatively large dictionary. How do I know the size? well when I save it using cPickle the size of the file will grow approx. 400Mb. cPickle  is supposed to be much faster than pickle but loading and saving this file just takes a lot of time. I have a Dual Core laptop 2.6 Ghz with 4GB RAM on a Linux machine. Does anyone have any suggestions for a faster saving and loading of dictionaries in python? thanks
That is a lot of data...
What kind of contents has your dictionary? If it is only primitive or fixed datatypes, maybe a real database or a custom file-format is the better option?
Fastest way to save and load a large dictionary in Python