How to refer to children in a tree with millions of nodes

Question

I\'m attempting to build a tree, where each node can have an unspecified amount of children nodes. The tree is to have over a million nodes in practice.

I\'ve manage

Answer 1

How many of your nodes will be "leaf" nodes? Perhaps only create the data structure to store children when you first have a child, otherwise keeping a null reference.

Unless you need to look up the children as a map, I'd use a List<T> (initialized with an appropriate capacity) instead of a Dictionary<,> for the children. It sounds like you may have more requirements than you've explained though, which makes it hard to say.

I'm surprised you're failing after only a few thousand nodes though - you should be able to create a pretty large number of objects before having problems.

I'd also suggest that if you think you'll end up using a lot of memory, make sure you're on a 64-bit machine and make sure your application itself is set to be 64-bit. (That may just be a thin wrapper over a class library, which is fine so long as the class library is set to be 64-bit or AnyCPU.)