[pybsddb] Len() operation taking a long time

[andrew]

Hi All,

I'm working with pybsddb on a database of around 1.5M keys and around
1.2GB on disk, and I've noticed that doing a len() on the database is
taking around 10 minutes. The database is just a hashed store, btw, not
a btree. I'm a bsddb novice but I would have thought that the number of
keys in the database would be stored somewhere, but from what I've read
so far it looks like the database has to be scanned to do this, which
seems crazy.

Any ideas if the 10 minutes is reasonable for a database of this size
(on a fast server-grade machine) ? I was previously fetching all the
keys and taking the len of that, but then switched to the built-in len()
mapping on the database - but it still takes 10 minutes.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers, Andrew.