 guido i don t know how big that pickle would be maybe loading it each time is fine or maybe marshalling my tests train on about NUMBER NUMBER msgs and a binary pickle of the database is approaching NUMBER million bytes i haven t done anything to try to reduce its size and know of some specific problem areas for example doing character NUMBER grams of long words containing high bit characters generates a lot of database entries and i suspect they re approximately worthless otoh adding in more headers will increase the size so let s call it NUMBER meg wink 