I need a hint on an Interview question that I came across. I tried to find a solution but I need advice from experts over here. What are the different strategies you would employ had you came across this particular situation? The question and my thoughts are as follows:
Q. You want to store a huge number of objects in a list in java. The number of objects is very huge and gradually increasing, but you have very limited memory available. How would you do that?
A. I answered by saying that, once the number of elements in the list get over a certain threshold, I would dump them to a file. I would typically then build cache-like data-structure that would hold the most-frequently or recently added elements. I gave an analogy of page swapping employed by the OS.
Q. But this would involve disk access and it would be slower and affect the execution.
I did not know the solution for this and could not think properly during the interview. I tried to answer as:
A. In this case, I would think of horizontally scaling the system or adding more RAM.
Immediately after I answered this, my telephonic interview ended. I felt that the interviewer was not happy with the answer. But then, what should have been the answer.
Moreover, I am not curious only about the answer, I would like to learn about different ways with which this can be handled.