Decreasing the size of cPickle objects

You can combine your cPickle dump call with a zipfile:

import cPickle
import gzip

def save_zipped_pickle(obj, filename, protocol=-1):
    with gzip.open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        cPickle.dump(obj, f, protocol)

And to re-load a zipped pickled object:

def load_zipped_pickle(filename):
    with gzip.open(filename, 'rb') as f:
        loaded_object = cPickle.load(f)
        return loaded_object