[galarneau]

I'm working on an app that stores all of it's data in a dictionary, and writes it to disk for permanent storage.

I wrote a test scenario that made a test dictionary with 50,000 items, and then wrote it to disk. I then made another app to read it back into memory.

The question is: Is this bad form? What is the appropriate way to store a large amount of data on disk and have it available for random access?

To get an idea of what this app does, it is a training log for triathlon training, and each entry into the log is an item in my dictionary.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Catfish_Man]

Well, iirc, a hashtable is O(n) unless it has a lot of collisions, so adding more elements shouldn't increase the access time. It'll take up a lot of memory if it's that big, but I can't see it taking up more than storing it in a different way.

[IamBob]

You might just try breaking the dictionary into smaller chunks...

If every month, week or day was stored in its own dictionary you could keep from saving, loading and dealing with a single huge one.

The archiving docs might be worth reading too.