Once again thank you.
It is not easy (for me at least) to express true intent in words alone (without tone of voice and facial expressions), I really am grateful to everyone and do not mean to be difficult, I am just trying to understand the details.
I know for example I cannot create a simple object, add it to a list and repeat until there are billiions of simple objects in the list because I would run out of memory before the list is complete and before I can serialize it.
But could I create a simple object, serialize it and then repeat (billiions of times) to end up with a huge file? If so, how do I then deserialize it, I assume I just read it one simple object at a time? Using readObject?
Similarly, another external machine with say tens times the amount of memory that I have may create a massive list with billions of objects (that do fit into memory) and then serialize it.
In this case, is it only possible to deserialize the whole object (a list of billions, which I do not have memory for) or can I read x number of objects from the list at a time? If I can what method(s) should I be looking at?
Thanks again all.