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Speed III
Serialisation and back again is generally an expensive operation. This is a consequence of weak typing. Sometimes writing custom serialisers for transporting is worthwhile.
Pickle (well, cPickle) is the most general thing with a knowledge of Python (so easy to use). It is also quite slow and needs careful watching where untrusted data can be passed in.
Remember: Unpickling random data is not safe!
For just flattening sequences, special classes (lists of attributes) and dictionaries, special purpose flattening code is better.
Converting BCD values into Python numbers was sped up approximately two orders of magnitude by rewriting in carefully crafted C.