Search code examples
perlramdisk

How to keep a big hash on disk instead of in RAM?

I've got too little RAM to finish a calculation because of a large hash. Is there a drop-in Perl module that would let me use the hash without keeping it all in RAM? I expect it to top out around 4GB, and I've got a bit less than 2GB available for the script. I don't think processing time or disk I/O would be an issue.

Solution

  • You can use dbm_open to open a hash connected to a DBM file. These are not particularly sophisticated and can handle shallow hashes of simple keys and values.

    For anything more sophisticated, I would recommend using SQLite.