Dictionary size issue

Question

Hello everyone,


I have a very simple data structure representing a book, including ID/title/author/price, no more big field, all are strings. My application provides simple interface to query book information by book ID.

1.

And I want to store book information into Dictionary, book ID as key and other data as value. My question is are there any best practices about the size of a Dictionary should be? The total data is very big (a couple of G bytes monitored from physical serialized file), and I am not sure whether I should divide the data into several Dictionary or just use one?

2.

Does Dictionary use page file to swap storage (e.g. Dictionary could be able to store more information than physical memory limitation of current computer if it could use swap page file) or just use pure memory?


thanks in advance,
George