Pickle based workflow - looking for advice

[Robin Becker]

for what it's worth I believe that marshal is a faster method for storing simple 
python objects. So if your information can be stored using simple python things 
eg strings, floats, integers, lists and dicts then storage using marshal is 
faster than pickle/cpickle. If you want to persist the objects for years then 
the pickle protocol is probably better as it is not python version dependant.
-- 
Robin Becker