As a followup to my previous question, I essentially have to create a huge array of arrays of arrays of arrays, but the program dies apparently because it runs out of memory. (It gives no error message or warning, just stops.) This is a simplification of the problem: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my %hash = ();
foreach my $a (1..500) {
    foreach my $b (1..4000) {
        foreach my $c (1..10) {
            foreach my $d (1..7) {
                $hash{$a}{$b}{$c}{$d} = $d;
            }
        }
    }
}
print "here\n";

[download]

That program dies without reaching the print statement. I'm running Windows XP.

What's my best solution here? Obviously I could write everything to disk somehow, but that seems like it would be pretty slow, especially since I'll need to access it a lot to do computations. Do I need a database? Help! :)

In reply to My data structure needs too much memory! by Jman1

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