Pickle/unpickle is slow

[onyxfish]

Can I switch to something like JSON and keep it generic? Is there a method I can implement on my agate objects to ensure they serialize correctly?

http://www.benfrederickson.com/dont-pickle-your-data/
https://kovshenin.com/2010/pickle-vs-json-which-is-faster/
http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2015/03/16/Fast-Serialization/

[onyxfish]

Should probably stay with pickle so things continue to work with other libraries, but may just be able to pickle less stuff from agate classes:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html#pickling-class-instances

[onyxfish]

Should probably also be explicit about pickle protocols:

https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/pickle.html#data-stream-format

[onyxfish]

I don't see anything that can be avoided in the pickling. If it's going to be faster it's gonna have to be by finding a faster serializer.

[jpmckinney]

Pickle is much faster in Python 3.8+.