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Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables
From: |
Roland Orre |
Subject: |
Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables |
Date: |
08 Feb 2003 14:57:58 +0100 |
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 12:00, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When declaring a hash table using
>
> (define H (make-hash-table 100))
No, the hash table is a vector of entries to lists where the actual
information is stored. A hash table in guile can therefore contain
any number of items. The number of entries is merely a choice of what
performance you need. If you declare too few entries you will get
a lot of linear search through the lists from each entry.
I myself use to estimate it so that the lists will rarely be deeper
than two or three to get a reasonable performance.
The performance is also reflected upon the hash function versus the
vector length. Usually it is advisable to use a prime number to avoid
systematic hashing to the same entries. Sometime it happened I missed
this and sloppily declared the hash table length to e.g. 1000000 if
needing about 3000000 items. The run took several hours instead of
the expected half an hour, which I got when changing the length to
1000003. If you have access to some mathematical package like maple
there is often a function nextprime which can be helpful.
Usually the built-in hash functions works fine but you may also
consider making a special hash functions for special needs if
the built-in function doesn't spread good enough.
Best regards
Roland Orre
>
> does this mean that the number of slots will *always* remain 100?
>
> I am frequently dealing with hash tables where I do not
> have a reasonable estimation of number of entires in advance.
> In TeXmacs, I therefore implemented a hash table type which
> doubles the number of slots each time that the number of entries
> becomes larger than a constant times the number of slots
> (and divides by two the number of slots when the number of
> entries becomes smaller than a constant times the number of slots).
> Has a similar system been implemented in (an extension of) guile?
>
> Thanks for your help, Joris
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
> http://www.texmacs.org: GNU TeXmacs scientific text editor
> http://www.math.u-psud.fr/~vdhoeven: personal homepage
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Guile-user mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-user
--
- Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Joris van der Hoeven, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables,
Roland Orre <=
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Joris van der Hoeven, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Roland Orre, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Joris van der Hoeven, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Mikael Djurfeldt, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Joris van der Hoeven, 2003/02/11
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Joris van der Hoeven, 2003/02/11
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Mikael Djurfeldt, 2003/02/11
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Roland Orre, 2003/02/08
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Andreas Rottmann, 2003/02/10
- Re: Efficiency and flexibility of hash-tables, Greg Troxel, 2003/02/10