[CyberDildonics]

I think these are the types of questions that should be asked long before run times end up being measured in days and memory usage is measured in terabytes.

Linked lists are good for when you need inserts and deletes in the middle of a list and traditional linked lists made from memory allocations and pointers are obsolete.

Even if you don't know how many items you will have in advance, allocating large arrays still works. You can always chain large arrays together. The strange thing is that you are saying you use linked lists, but you are allocating them out of arrays that are already allocated.