It surprises me that Tokyo Cabinet is so slow to load, as I've had great success with it on my own, but I've not used Tyrant/pytyrant. I'd love to see some information on where the bottlenecks are in the loading process, as it seems to me that there's something funky going on that can likely be improved pretty easily.

Edit: He notes in the comments that a switch to pytc (direct Tokyo Cabinet bindings rather than going through Tyrant) would improve things, but that he wanted to keep it distributed. I'd still like to see where the bottlenecks are, though.