> Victor, have you tried using peek() instead of seek()? 
> I mentioned this previously in msg85780.

In a file encoded in protocol 0, backward seek are needed to each call to unpickler_readline... and this function is called to read a number, a boolean, etc. (to read most, or all, data values). I choosed to disable the read buffer because it's slower with it.

For protocol 1 and 2, there is only *one* seek at the end (but a lot of read: file size / 4096). So I don't think that it does really matter to use peek or seek.

seek() is more natural (for me) and frequent than peek(), so I prefer to keep seek().