actually - don't overestimate the power of Storable. Here are some benchmarks we did, because we tried to harness storables power and failed(?):

We have a large hash. Where there is a key and the value is a list of sets of strings. We had an OLD method to store them:

Extracting these strings (iterating the whole data structure), concatenating them in a sensible way (unique delimiters) and storing them to disk.

And we tried a new way: Store them via Storable.

Storable was about 7 times slower than the old method when saving the data, about 5 times faster when retrieving the data and took about 10 times more space on disk.

For our special purposes, we decided to stick with the old method, but you may find it worth to try storable. It's way easier and consistent. On the other side - even though it saves everything in a binary form it still needs much space on disk as it saves the complete data structure too.

You might save that space, when rebuilding that data-structure on the fly while reading the data in.

Bye
 PetaMem