Offloading graph components to persistent storage for reducing resident memory in distributed graph processing

One or more non-transitory storage media storing instructions which, when executed by one or more computing devices, cause performance of:

• maintaining metadata for a plurality of graph components, wherein the metadata comprises, for each given graph component, a memory-state indicator that indicates whether the given graph component is stored in memory;
• identifying a set of graph components required to execute a graph processing operation on a graph by a job in a graph processing engine of a database system;
• identifying, based on the metadata, a first subset of the set of graph components that are stored in the memory and a second subset of the set of graph components that are not stored in the memory;
• determining an amount of memory needed to load the second subset of graph components into the memory;
• reserving an amount of memory needed to load the second subset of graph components into the memory;
• loading the second subset of graph components into the memory;
• and
• initiating execution of the graph processing operation using the set of graph components in the memory.