I'm trying to make my program faster, so I'm profiling it. Right now the top reason is:
566 1.780 0.003 1.780 0.003 (built-in method decode)
What is this exactly? I never call 'decode' anywhere in my code. It reads text files, but I don't believe they are unicode-encoded.
Presumably this is str.decode ... search your source for "decode". If it's not in your code, look at Python library routines that show up in the profile results. It's highly unlikely to be to be anything to do with cPickle. Care to show us a few more "reasons", preferably with the column headings, to give us a wider view of your problem?
Can you explain the connection between "using cPickle" and "some test cases would run faster"?
You left the X and Y out of "Is there anything that will do task X faster than resource Y?" ... Update so you were asking about cPickle. What are you using for the (optional) protocol arg of cPickle.dump() and/or cPickle.dumps() ?
I believe decode is called anytime you are converting unicode strings into ascii strings. I am guessing you have a large amount of unicode data. I'm not sure how the internals of pickle work, but it sounds like that unicode data gets converted to ascii when pickled?
(Answering @Claudiu's latest question, weirdly hidden in a commennt...?!-)... To really speed up pickling, try unladen swallow -- most of its ambitious targets are still to come, but it DOES already give at least 20-25% speedup in pickling and unpickling.