C++ vector out of memory

Question

I have a very large vector (millions of entries 1024 bytes each). I am exceeding the maximum size of the vector (getting a bad memory alloc exception). I am doing a recursive operation over the vector of items which requires accessing other elements in the vector. The operations need to be done quickly. I am trying to avoid writing to disk for speed reasons. Is there any other way to store this data that would not require writing to disk? If I have to write the data to disk, what would be the most ideal way to do it>

edit for a few more details.

The operations that I am performing on the data set is generating a string recursively based on other data points in the vector. The data is sorted when it is read in. Data sets ranging from 50,000 to 50,000,0000.

Answer 1

The easiest way to solve this problem is to use STXXL. It's a reimplementation of the STL for large structures that transparently writes to disk when the data won't fit in memory.