[shelve] What are the limitations? Entering too many data crashes it on my machine!

[Jeff Epler]

I use "shelve" in an irc bot.  There are well over 100k keys (possibly
more like 1Mkeys) in the shelf, which is 1.7G large on disk.  At peak
usage, the bot probably makes up to 100 inserts or 400 queries per minute,
and has been running nearly continuously (with restarts) for over a year.
No problems (with the exception of running out of diskspace).  However,
I'm using (according to file(1)) "GNU dbm 1.x or ndbm database, little
endian".  Oh, and the Python version is almost certainly 1.5.2.

shelve itself is very unlikely to be where the problem lies.  The
individual database library or Python database module may be, however.

Jeff