slowdown with massive memory usage

[Hallvard B Furuseth]

I have a program which starts by reading a lot of data into various
dicts.

When I moved a function to create one such dict from near the beginning
of the program to a later time, that function slowed down by a factor
of 8-14: 38 sec at 15M memory usage, 570 sec at 144M, 330 sec at 200M.
Is there anything I can do to fix that?

When the program is running, the system has 18M free memory and is not
doing any swapping.  `python -O' did not help.

Python: 2.2.3 configured with --enable-ipv6 --enable-unicode=ucs4
on i386-redhat-linux-gnu (Linux 2.4.21-15.0.2.ELsmp).
I'm not sure if upgrading to Python 2.3 is an option at the moment;
I'll check if necessary.

-- 
Hallvard