Limit on Number of Individuals - Categorized in: General Discussion

There's no size limit on array sizes, if that's what you mean. But every program runs into trouble at some point simply due to memory requirements to load in a large number of individuals or due to taking an extraordinarily long amount of time.

Tamura Jones wrote a program that creates bigger and bigger GEDCOM files doubling in the number of individuals each time. Each was a power of 2 and he calls that power a Fan Value. He then tested various GEDCOM checking programs.

Behold's Fan Value was found to be 19, meaning it was able to load 2^19 = 524,288 people, but it couldn't load 2^20 = 1,048,576 people. Currently, Behold's limited because it loads everything into memory and for that many people, it uses up the entire 2 GB address space that 32-bit Windows allows.

The next set of changes I'll be working on will include saving the data to a disk file with much less in memory. I expect that will increase Behold's fan value to 22 or 23. (4 million or 8 million people). Not too long after that, I'll be creating a 64-bit version of Behold, and that might be able to increase the fan value several more, which will then be constrained by how fast Behold can load the data, rather than by memory.