Efficiently finding the shortest path in large graphs

Question

I\'m looking to find a way to in real-time find the shortest path between nodes in a huge graph. It has hundreds of thousands of vertices and millions of edges. I know this

Answer 1

Well, it depends on how much metadata you have attached to your nodes and edges. If relatively little, that size of graph would fit into memory, and I'd thus recommend the excellent NetworkX package (see especially http://networkx.lanl.gov/reference/generated/networkx.shortest_path.html), which is pure Python.

For a more robust solution that can handle many millions of nodes, large metadata, with transactions, disk storage, etc., I've had great luck with neo4j (http://www.neo4j.org/). It is written in Java but has Python bindings or can be run as a REST server. Traversal with it is a little tricker but not bad.