Daniel Fischer wrote:
Most certainly not. I'm pretty sure this is to a bug in your code. Something retains a data structure which is actually unneeded. Probably
Apparently. And my money is on a load of lines from the file (of which I need only the first and last Char).
Then you're doing it wrong[TM]. You shouldn't need to keep any part of the input in memory. Whatever it is, nobody can tell you without seeing the code. Try heap profiling, should you have no idea where to look for leaks.
How could I solve the problem without representing the graph in some way?
By using an advanced tool called "brains". Sorry for not being more specific, but that's actually the fun part of the challenge and I'm not going to spoil it for you. ;-)
Forgive the stupid question, but where if not RAM would the chunk currently processed reside?
Oh, I overlooked "chunk". Well, yes, the "chunk" currently processed needs to fit into RAM. But how much of a problem could a single Char pose? Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
I agree. Some problems simply require you to hold large strings in memory. And for those, [Char] conks out around 5-10M (try reversing a 10M [Char]).
Sure, this one just isn't of that kind. Udo. -- "Irrationality is the square root of all evil" -- Douglas Hofstadter