[sepeth]

I also used this in a similar situation, it helped me to save a lot of memory in my skiplist implementation:

https://github.com/sepeth/python-skiplist/commit/00ae7f94246...

Redis's skiplist is also using the same feature:

https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.h#...

[skarap]

In my case the software used mmap-ed file for storage - I couldn't believe how easy is was to work with the data this way!