Performance of cPickle module

[sh at defuze.org]

Hi guys,

Well, I have a (maybe dumb) question.

I want to write my own little blog using Python (as a fairly small but doable
project for myself to learn more deaply Python in a web context).

I don't want so far to use a database as a backend, I'd prefer use XML which is
enough for a small amount of data the blog would have to deal with.

My problem is that, as HTTP is stateless, I can't keep some objects alive across
multiple requests like for instance an instance of a Users class which is an
interface to manage my users.

Let's say for example, that an user wants to access a resource (a simple web
page), my code would call that Users class though an instance of it and would
call something like getUser(self,login) returning an instance of an UserData
class which would provide me with all the details of that user (name, email,
etc.)

I want to save my users not in a database like I said but in an XML file on the
server.

As HTTP is stateless, I believe that I will have to create again and again the
Users object for every requests.

I don't want to parse the xml file each time, instead I want to save the Users
object (that keeps a map to all my UserData objects) into a file using the
cPickle module.

My question therefore is, is my architecture efficient enough ?

If I had to use a database, the database would keep track of my users and I
would only need to do a SQL statement. Would the cPickle more efficient in my
case than a database ?

To give a bit of code let's say that I have something like :

import cPickle

class UserData:
def __init__(self,name,email):
self.name = name
self.email = email

class Users:
def __init__(self):
self.users = {}
self.hasChanged = false

def _deserialize(self):
if self.hasChanged == false:
self.users = cPickle.load('users.dat')
else:
#parse the xml file...

Is it an efficient method ?

Thanks
- Sylvain