Greetings Monks,

I come to you today with a logistical problem rather than a programming one.
Firstly, I am doing this on a linux box.
I am working on a script which deals with very large arrays which will, if left to its own devices, fill up all the memory on a machine.
The most logical thing I can think of is a quick sub to swap in and out the contents of the array, so I'm not completely filling up the memory -- but the question is, for speed and efficiency, what should I swap the unused data out to?

Imagine a web spider that caches unchecked links as it goes by popping them onto an array. Leave it for a few hours/days, and eventually you're out of memory.
I figure what makes sense is keeping a number of entries in memory (say, 50,000), and popping all new 'URLs' onto an out-of-memory stack. When I have depleted my 50,000 URLs in my array, I swap 50,000 back in from the stack and carry on with those.
Making sense? Good. So -- how do I store the stack? A friend suggested using a RDBS, which would work - but could there be a faster way?

Thanks all,
JP

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

In reply to How to best handle memory intensive operations by JPaul

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