Serialization is very expansive compared to shared data structures. Even if not everybody is affected by that, it still makes serialization unsuitable as a general solution in this case.
Would someone please help me out and point me at a way of efficiently exposing a read-only block of memory to Python?
EDIT: Looks like "MemoryView" introduced in 2.7 is the answer.
as for shared memory, have you tried just mmap'ing the node from /dev/shm ?
EDIT: I just saw your edit. That's what I'm doing --- shm_open(), ftruncate(), then mmap(). A little annoying that it doesn't automatically kill the shared memory when the program terminates, but still...