Got RAM?

C:\>perl -e "foreach (1..40_000){push @foo, {}}; print scalar @foo"
40000
[download]

If you've got enough RAM, I don't see why not. You may want to look at some sort of tied, disk resident data structure, it will be slower but might not eat all your RAM. Since I still haven't mastered tie, someone smarter that I shall have to go into more detail, but I bet you could tie an array to a DBM file and just use your array index for the keys.

TGI says moo

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @a; 
push @a,{ "$_" => 1 } for 1..40000; 
print Dumper @a[30000..30010];
[download]

mr.nick ...

1.22 seconds on a an UltraSparc 30, with 250MHz UltraSPARC-II and 256M of memory.

I'm impressed with how fast perl did that, especially on my workstation, which normally runs everything extremely sloooow.

-xPhase

As noted before, it's all about RAM.

I have 256Mb of RAM in my system & it took about 25 seconds to run the above code, slightly modified, to process 400,000 hashes. This was with The Palm Desktop, Mozilla & Outlook running in the background under Windoze NT on a 500Mhz P3.

Is that enough of a real world example for you? (;