Dictionary size/speed limit?

[Michael Morrison]

I'm comtemplating a new program I'll be creating, and I plan on having a
dictionary with around 20000-50000 entries.

This dictionary will be searched many thousands of times itself, all at
once.  ie. read a file with 20000 keys, find value in dictionary for each
key.  (The dictionary size and file size have no relationship, and actually,
the file size will probably be larger than the dictionary in some cases)

So, is using the regular Python dictionary just an insane idea? :)  Should I
create something in C to do this for me, or are there modules to do this
sort of thing?

Thanks,
borlak