Re^3: Split a file based on column

[space_monk]

in reply to Re^2: Split a file based on column
in thread Split a file based on column

You caught my comment whilst it was being drafted; I did state another reason for the approach I suggested.

Memory is almost never a problem nowadays unless you're running it on your 15 year old PC, but 300k rows * 64 k per row (19GB??) may give some pause for thought. Time to go shopping for more memory or increase your cache. :-)

[davido]

Loading a 19GB file into memory does indeed give pause for thought.... long long pause. :) Time enough to contemplate approaches that do scale well.

Your accumulate and write when full strategy is a pretty good idea. It would be a data cache rather than a filehandle cache, and the implementation ought to be pretty straight forward. Implementing the file-handle LFU cache seems like it would be more fun though.