Re: Multitasking and containers

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 28 Nov 2006 11:17:33 -0800, Matthew Heaney wrote:

> The issue with hash tables is not the computation of the hash value,
> but rather if the hash function is poor and there are many collisions.
> If that's the case then the time to compare the key to items already in
> that bucket will be large compared to the cost of computing the hash
> value itself.

Yes. This is why one should look into the container, as I said before. You
lock not the container as a whole, but the bucket. The advantage is that in
this case you can lock buckets in a preemptive way, lifting the problem of
too long waits, while loosing little: doubled overhead of a protected
action. This is how our middleware works. Actually it is just a specialized
hash table of process variables. Because it were too expensive to maintain
a lock per bucket, I grouped them into a lesser number of "access
channels."

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de