This is slightly off topic, but I'm hoping folks can point me in the right direction.
I'm looking for a fairly lightweight key/value store that works for this type of problem: ideally plays nice with the Python ecosystem the data set is static, and written infrequently enough that I definitely want *read* performance to trump all there is too much data to keep it all in memory (so no memcache) users will access keys with fairly uniform, random probability the key/value pairs are fairly homogenous in nature: keys are <= 16 chars values are between 1k and 4k bytes generally approx 3 million key/value pairs total amount of data == 6Gb needs to work on relatively recent versions of FreeBSD and Linux My current solution works like this: keys are file paths directories are 2 levels deep (30 dirs w/100k files each) values are file contents The current solution isn't horrible, but I'm try to squeeze a little performance/robustness out of it. A minor nuisance is that I waste a fair amount of disk space, since the values are generally less than 4k in size. A larger concern is that I'm not convinced that file systems are optimized for dealing with lots of little files in a shallow directory structure. To deal with the latter issue, a minor refinement would be to deepen the directory structure, but I want to do due diligence on other options first. I'm looking for something a little lighter than a full-on database (either SQL or no-SQL), although I'm not completely ruling out any alternatives yet. As I mention up top, I'm mostly hoping folks can point me toward sources they trust, whether it be other mailing lists, good tools, etc. To the extent that this is on topic and folks don't mind discussing this here, I'm happy to follow up on any questions. Thanks, Steve P.S. I've already found some good information via Google, but there's a lot of noise out there. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list