Re: searching in set vs. vector

From:

"Greg Herlihy" <greghe@pacbell.net>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

30 Apr 2006 12:57:51 -0400

Message-ID:

<1146354235.165628.272090@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>

Mehturt@gmail.com wrote:

I have found an article with 50 STL tips.. I am wondering about tip
#23:

-- snip --
23) Consider replacing associative containers with sorted vectors.

Associative containers are implemented as balanced binary search trees,
good for a mix of insertions, erasures and lookups. If insertions are
mostly separate from lookups, you can use vectors which would take less
memory, sort it and use lookups at a cost of log n.
-- snip --

I have made a test on GNU/Linux using g++ 4.0 comparing searches in
std::vector<int> and std::set<int> and it seems searches in sorted
vector are faster only for small sizes (about 10 elements), for
anything bigger std::set<int> is much faster (the more elements, the
greater the difference). I mean I'm using std::set<> and std::map<>
not only to store sorted data, but only to have fast searches in the
container.. The memory usage is not really a case for me..

So perhaps somebody can explain this tip a bit further.. I can post the
code I did for testing - if that is relevant..

Before posting your code you may wish to correct it and use
std::lower_bound when searching the std::vector. You may at the same
time also need to revise your findings about which technique is
actually the faster.

Greg

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