so then tim peters tim one comcast net is all like i m not sure what you re doing but suspect you re storing individual wordinfo pickles if so most of the administrative pickle bloat is due to that and doesn t happen if you pickle an entire classifier instance directly yeah that s exactly what i was doing i didn t realize i was incurring administrative pickle bloat this way i m specifically trying to make things faster and smaller so i m storing individual wordinfo pickles into an anydbm dict keyed by token the result is that it s almost NUMBER times faster to score messages one per run our of procmail NUMBERs vs NUMBER NUMBERs however it does say all over the place that the goal of this project isn t to make the fastest or the smallest implementation so i guess i ll hold off doing any further performance tuning until the goal starts to point more in that direction NUMBER seconds is probably fast enough for people to use it in their procmailrc which is what i was after if you re desparate to save memory write a subclass that s probably what i ll do if i get too antsy trying to think of ways to sneak administrative pickle boat into casual conversation neale 