If you keep the pairs, i.e. 2 dim points, how would you want to sort them in one dimension?

> the OP hasn't told us yet what his final goal is!

Exactly!

For instance, if he wanted to process the data sequentially he could also sort them into HoHs or AoHs, since Perl is swapping out unused data.

Like this only the currently processed second level structure would be in RAM and the performance overhead for swapping would be negligible.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^3: Memory efficient way to deal with really large arrays? by LanX
in thread Memory efficient way to deal with really large arrays? by sectokia

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