Oh, nice! I was about to argue that one character scalars making quotation marks more than 60% of the data rigged the test in favor of Storable but I upped the "word" size and the difference remains at about 30% in favor of Storable. Sidebar: on my box at least, Storable sees *negative* change from zipping: i.e., the zipped Storable is slightly bigger than the raw nstore .