It depends on what you mean by 'efficient': small or fast.
TMTOWTDI: generally speaking the most efficent size to be loaded on any (virtual memory) system is a page, but... The size of a page varies between systems, on 32-bit Intel the page-size (Windoze or Linux) is 4kb. The paging manager in the Operating System loads code and data pages from the page (or swap) file. You can take advantage of this by using a memory mapped file (File Mapping, or Section, Objects on Windows), and on-demand page loading, which most OS's support.
Using memory mapping (see IPC::Mmap on CPAN) you should then be able to store the whole lot in one huge file, but the underlying system should only load the pages needed as required.

In reply to Re^3: storing huge graph by cdarke
in thread storing huge graph by spx2

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.