Using a file on an ssd for storage of nodes in complex networks.

File: 1471580612538.jpg (118KB, 968x334px) Image search: [Google]

118KB, 968x334px

I am working on a program that simulates nodes interacting. In the last versions I quickly hit a ceiling of several million nodes as they were quite large memory wise, around 80bytes iirc. My new version is much better because I do not store all of the information, instead it is gathered when needed. An example is storing the number of connections between nodes, now I loop through them until I hit a null connection and return the result. Much smaller memory, but much heavier on processing time.

My question is would it be feasible to store the nodes in a file on an ssd and use the file stream to manipulate them w/o loading them into memory? This way the ceiling would be so high it would no longer be a concern, however, what problems may I encounter? I could once again store all the node information saving processing time, but would the reading and writing be so slow to make it unworkable? Does anyone have experience with something like this? Any problems that are not obvious?

One thing I was worried about was working with multiple networks but I will not be anywhere near the 512 cap.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kdfaxaay.aspx

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. C++ is the language I am using.