I have a large dictionary mapping keys (which are strings) to objects. I pickled this large dictionary and at certain times I want to pull out only a handful of entries from it. The dictionary has usually thousands of entries total. When I load the dictionary using pickle, as follows:

from cPickle import *
# my dictionary from pickle, containing thousands of entries
mydict = open(load('mypickle.pickle'))
# accessing only handful of entries here
for entry in relevant_entries:
  # find relevant entry
  value = mydict[entry]

I notice that it can take up to 3-4 seconds to load the entire pickle, which I don't need, since I access only a tiny subset of the dictionary entries later on (shown above.)

How can I make it so pickle only loads those entries that I have from the dictionary, to make this faster?

Thanks.