Re: 100,000 names in AE....how?

I think you'd be insane to try this in AE ;)

I can only think of two ways to do it - either you load one text layer with a massive string representing all 100,000 names (not practical, would probably bust the maximum length of the string, and you wouldn't be able to position any of the text) or you create 100,000 layers, one for each name. Until Adobe think of some kind of efficient way to instance layers, this would likely kill your CPU and memory instead of the graphics card. Plus it would be horrendously slow. I've done things before with only a few hundred layers which are all controlled with the same expression code linked to expression controls, and depending on how complex the expressions are I tend to get between 1 and 3 fps on an 8-core machine.

Also, it sounds like each name has an associated date determining its position. There is no way of storing data like this in AE efficiently.

It sounds like what you've got already works pretty well - is it Flash or Processing or something? I don't really get why you want to change it...