I’m keeping a record of what I’m calling profiles.

Each profile is a tuple of dictionaries: (Dict,Dict), and we can associate to it a unique id(may include characters like _ or -).

I need to keep them in RAM memory for a certain time, because I’ll need to search and updated some of them, and only at the end, when I no longer need the whole set of profiles will I flush them to persistent storage.

Currently, I’m using a dictionary/hash table to keep all of them (number of elements around 100K, but could be more), since I’ll do many searches, using the id:profile as the key:value pair.

The data looks similar to this:

{
"Aw23_1adGF":({
     "data":
        {"contacts":[11,22],"address":"usa"},
     "meta_data":
        {"created_by":"John"}
    },{"key_3":"yes"}),
"AK23_1adGF":({
     "data":
        {"contacts":[33,44],"address":"mexico"},
     "meta_data":
        {"created_by":"Juan"}
    },{"key_3":"no"}),
# ...
}

Once this data structure is built, I don’t need to add/delete any more elements. I only build it once, than search it many times. On certain occasions I’ll need to update some element in the dictionaries that compose a profile. However, building this data object contributes to the peak RAM usage that I’m trying to diminish.

The problem is that the dictionary seems to use too much RAM.

So I was wondering what were my other options regarding data structures that could keep some of the search efficiency and with a small RAM footprint.

I thought of an ordered list, since the id seems to me to be orderable (maybe except for characters like _ or -).

What data structures are there that could help me in this predicament?

Edit: There’s no mention in the link that allowed this question to be closed to RAM usage, or search efficiency. There’s also no other choice for this problem than a ‘frozen dict’? This seems to have been a lazy review/moderation of content…