bsddb bloat in shelve?

[Bill Janssen]

Hi!

I've been using shelve (apparently with bsddb, but how does one tell?)
to maintain a few dictionaries of some of the headers in mail messages,
for a mail folder.  I'm finding that the files containing the persistent
data are incredibly bloated.  I'm just keeping a few of the headers for
each message, such as From, Date, and Subject, but the index files for
40MB of total mail are 150MB!  Even full-text-indexing them with Verity
does better:  50 MB of indexing for 40MB of mail.

I wonder if there is some tuning that needs to be done.  For example, my
app never calls sync() on the dictionaries.  Should it?  Will this make
a difference?  What would?

Bill