What's the fastest way to save/load a large list in Python 2.7?  I apologize if this has already been asked, I couldn't find an answer to this exact question when I searched...
More specifically, I'm testing out methods for simulating something, and I need to compare the result from each method I test out to an exact solution.  I have a Python script that produces a list of values representing the exact solution, and I don't want to re-compute it every time I run a new simulation.  Thus, I want to save it somewhere and just load the solution instead of re-computing it every time I want to see how good my simulation results are.
I also don't need the saved file to be human-readable.  I just need to be able to load it in Python.
I've done some profiling of many methods (except the numpy method) and pickle/cPickle is very slow on simple data sets.  The fastest way depends on what type of data you are saving.  If you are saving a list of strings and/or integers.  The fastest way that I've seen is to just write it directly to a file using a for loop and ','.join(...); read it back in using a similar for loop with .split(',').
What's the fastest way to save/load a large list in Python 2.7?