Sorted and reversed on huge dict ?

[Sion Arrowsmith]

 <vd12005 at yahoo.fr> wrote:
>so i just have tried, even if i think it will not go to the end => i
>was wrong : it is around 1.400.000 entries by dict...
>
>but maybe if keys of dicts are not duplicated in memory it can be done
>(as all dicts will have the same keys, with different (count) values)?

I've had programs handling dicts with 1.7million items and it isn't
a great problem, providing you're careful not to duplicate data.
Creating a copy of keys() in a separate list, for example, will
inflate memory usage noticably.

>memory is 4Gb of ram, [ ... ]

Unless you're on a 64bit OS, that's irrelevant. You'll hit the 2G
per-process limit before you start putting a strain on real memory.

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