GC is very expensive: am I doing something wrong?

I am loading a dictionary from a text file and constructing a trie data structure in memory. However, it takes longer than I'm happy with - about 12 seconds on my computer. I profiled it, came up with some clever ideas to cut down on the work (such as by exploiting the fact that the dictionary is s

TKinter and multiprocessing in GNU/Linux/X

I'm using the multiprocessing module in Python 2.6 to run a pygame application. When errors occur, I create a new Process with the multiprocessing module and have it display a TKinter dialog. The pygame application can carry on happily without waiting for the dialog. This works fine on Windows. How