Hi, I am not sure what exactly you want to achieve and for what reasons you need the "trajectories" (e.g. whether they have to be stored in a text-file format for some other processing step), but having a "dynamic network object", with a property map as you described, sounds like a good idea. Having 5000 nodes, with each having an associated 350 element double list will require roughly 5000*350*8bytes ~ 14MB of memory .... that should fit. For storing, you could pickle the whole graph object.... or/and, as you said, write the property map into a text-file using your format of choice ... René On 25 September 2013 12:47, Guillaume Gay <guillaume@mitotic-machine.org>wrote:

Hi,

I'm using graph tool to represent a mesh of apical junctions (interconnected cells in a tissue). As my simulation goes, positions of the graph nodes change. Positions are stored as 3 vertex property maps with type <double> (i.e. x, y and z). For now, I write a graphxml file (plus possibliy a .png image of the graph) each time I change the nodes positions.

I would like to store the history of each node position, in other terms its trajectory, but I feel that doing so by assigning a property map with type vector<double> to each node would produce big files: I typically have about 5000 vertices, and up to 350 'time points'. I would also need to store other propery maps (describing each vertex and edge state in the simulation). A full static view right now gives a 24 Mb xml file...

The point is I usually only need the static version, which I tend to open and close quite often, and that allready takes quite some time to open. So I thought I could for exemple store the graph's history in a separate h5 file and access only if needed, for exemple, and only store a reference to the file in the graph.

I'd really apreciate to have some insight into that before I go on coding...

Cheers,

Guillaume _______________________________________________ graph-tool mailing list graph-tool@skewed.de http://lists.skewed.de/mailman/listinfo/graph-tool

-- René Pfitzner, Dipl. Phys. Scientific assistant / Doctoral candidate ETH Zürich Chair of Systems Design +41-44-63-28478 rpfitzner@ethz.ch http://www.sg.ethz.ch/people/prene