I will try one last time. What I mean by "tell us what you want to achieve" is a description like the following. Talking about inserts and deletes is describing an implementation of what you're trying to achieve. At the moment we have ABSOLUTLY NO IDEA what your problem is, because you haven't even hinted at it yet.

So here's a compelely hypothetical example just to give you an idea of what sort of description I'm after.

"The program must process a large set of alphanumeric identifier tags, each mapped to a name. The program runs entirely in memory; it doesn't store permanent state to a file or database. The program reads in identifier / name pairs from a file or network socket; on startup there will be an initial "surge" of about a million records, then new records will appear at a slower rate. The program keeps the identifier/name pairs in memory. From time to time, queries will be received on a second socket; this may involve looking up a particular identifier, or returning a range of identifier values (the identifiers have batch numbers incorporated into them and sometimes you want to return all identifiers from that batch). Once an hour, the program will delete all identifiers whose batch number is more than 100 behind the most recent batch number."

Dave.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.