Inventive aspects include a method, apparatus, and system for partitioning and processing graph data for large-scale graphs. Such may include, in a partitioning pre-processing step, assigning a plurality of destination vertices to a plurality of partitions such that each destination vertex of the plurality of destination vertices is uniquely assigned to only one partition from among the plurality of partitions. Such may also include, in a main execution of external graph processing step, (i) loading a given partition of destination vertices from among the plurality of partitions from a solid state drive (SSD) into a main memory of a computing machine, (ii) streaming one or more chunks of source vertex data from the SSD into the main memory of the computing machine, and (iii) performing graph processing based at least on the loaded given partition of destination vertices and the streamed one or more chunks of source vertex data.