On Mon, 18 Nov 2013 16:25:07 -0600 Tim Peters <tim.pet...@gmail.com> wrote: > > [Antoine] > > Are very small pickles that size-sensitive? I have the impression that > > if 8 bytes vs. e.g. 15 bytes makes a difference for your application, > > you'd be better off with a hand-made format. > > The difference between 8 and 15 is, e.g., nearly doubling the amount > of network traffic (for apps that use pickles across processes or > machines). > > A general approach has no way to guess how it will be used. For > example, `multiprocessing` uses pickles extensively for inter-process > communication of Python data. Some users try broadcasting giant > arrays across processes, while others broadcast oceans of tiny > integers (like indices into giant arrays inherited via fork()).
Well, sending oceans of tiny integers will also incur many system calls and additional synchronization costs, since sending data on a multiprocessing Queue has to acquire a semaphore. So it generally sounds like a bad idea, IMHO. That said, I agree with: > Since pickle intends to be "the" Python serialization format, it > really should try to be friendly for all plausible uses. I simply don't think adding a fixed 8-byte overhead is actually annoying. It's less than the PyObject overhead in 64-bit mode... Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
