On Jul 18, 2011, at 9:36 AM, Steve wrote:

> I am wondering about the speed, but that is secondary.
> 
> How are the dictionaries for larger files with 100,000+ entries?


I have no experience with dictionaries of that size. For my dictionaries, each one has anywhere from 15 to 30 entries with approximately 300 occurrences. My users with more data have not complained about speed.

Speed is important at two general processing moments:

(1) Updating a CFArray ( i.e. removing, adding, changing )
(2) Reading the entire file into the array and writing the array to a file.

#1 in my experience is fast. I have not done any actual measurements to quantify this observation. This is expected because it happens all in memory. Most changes are done in memory unless the user specifically requests a file save. Some applications might need to write the file more often.

#2 should be slower due to constraints of the hard drive speed but I’ve seen no slowdowns writing the file sizes described above. My app doesn’t write the file that often, so there is less concern about speed. I would expect any file write of 100,000+ occurrences to be slower than in-memory changes.

My suggestion would be to modify one if the dictionary demos to test how it does with 100,000+ occurrences. Increase the # of fields to match your own and add 100,00 occurrences to the dictionary and write to a file.


Brian S