# 2.7. Hash Tables¶

The second major C++ data structure is the hash table. As you may recall, hash tables differ from arrays in that you can access items in a hash table by a key rather than a position. Later in this book you will see that there are many ways to implement a hash table. The thing that is most important to notice right now is that the get item and set item operations on a hash table is $$O(1)$$. Another important hash table operation is the contains operation. Checking to see whether a key is in the hash table or not is also $$O(1)$$. The efficiency of all hash table operations is summarized in Table 3. One important side note on hash table performance is that the efficiencies we provide in the table below are for average performance. In some rare cases the contains, get item, and set item operations can degenerate into $$O(n)$$ performance but we will get into that in a later chapter when we talk about the different ways that a hash table could be implemented.

Table 3: Big-O Efficiency of C++ hash table Operations
operation Big-O Efficiency
find O(1)
insert O(1)
erase O(1)
iteration O(n)

For our last performance experiment we will compare the performance of the contains operation between arrays and hash tables. In the process we will confirm that the contains operator for arrays is $$O(n)$$ and the contains operator for hash tables is $$O(1)$$. The experiment we will use to compare the two is simple. We’ll make an array with a range of numbers in it. Then we will pick numbers at random and check to see if the numbers are in the array. If our performance tables are correct the bigger the array the longer it should take to determine if any one number is contained in the array.

We will repeat the same experiment for a hash table that contains numbers as the keys. In this experiment we should see that determining whether or not a number is in the hash table is not only much faster, but the time it takes to check should remain constant even as the hash table grows larger.

Listing 6 implements this comparison. Notice that we are performing exactly the same operation, number in container. The difference is that on line 7 x is array, and on line 9 x is a hash table.

Listing 6

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 #include #include #include #include using namespace std; int main() { for( int a = 10000; a < 1000001; a = a + 20000) { // List Part clock_t begin = clock(); list x; for( int i = 0; i < a; i++){ x.push_back(i); } clock_t end = clock(); double elapsed_secs = double(end - begin) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC; // Hash Table Part clock_t begin_ht = clock(); unordered_map y; for( int j = 0; j < a; j++ ){ y[j] = NULL; } clock_t end_ht = clock(); double elapsed_secs_ht = double(end_ht - begin_ht) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC; // Printing final output cout << a << "\t" << elapsed_secs << "\t" << elapsed_secs_ht << endl; } return 0; } 
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 import timeit import random for i in range(10000,1000001,20000): t = timeit.Timer("random.randrange(%d) in x"%i, "from __main__ import random,x") x = list(range(i)) lst_time = t.timeit(number=1000) x = {j:None for j in range(i)} d_time = t.timeit(number=1000) print("%d,%10.3f,%10.3f" % (i, lst_time, d_time)) 

Figure 4 summarizes the results of running Listing 6. You can see that the hash table is consistently faster. For the smallest array size of 10,000 elements a hash table is 89.4 times faster than an array. For the largest array size of 990,000 elements the hash table is 11,603 times faster! You can also see that the time it takes for the contains operator on the array grows linearly with the size of the array. This verifies the assertion that the contains operator on a list is $$O(n)$$. It can also be seen that the time for the contains operator on a hash table is constant even as the hash table size grows. In fact for a hash table size of 10,000 the contains operation took 0.004 milliseconds and for the hash table size of 990,000 it also took 0.004 milliseconds.

Since C++ is an evolving language, there are always changes going on behind the scenes. The latest information on the performance of C++ data structures can be found on the C++ website.

Self Check

Q-1: Which of the list operations shown below is not O(1)?
• Popping the first index from an array.
• When you remove the first element of a list, all the other elements of the list must be shifted forward.
• Popping an element from the end of an array.
• Removing an element from the end of the list is a constant operation.
• Adding a new element to an array.
• Adding to the end of an array is a constant operation
• array[10]
• Indexing a array is a constant operation
• all of the above are O(1)
• There is one operation that requires all other list elements to be moved.
Q-2: Which of the hash table operations shown below is O(1)?
• mymap.count('x')
• count is a constant operation for a hash table because you do not have to iterate but there is a better answer.
• mymap.erase('x')
• removing an element from a hash table is a constant operation but there is a better answer.
• mymap['x'] = 10;
• Assignment to a hash table key is constant but there is a better answer.
• mymap['x'] = mymap['x'] + 1;
• Re-assignment to a hash table key is constant but there is a better answer.
• all of the above are O(1)
• The only hash table operations that are not O(1) are those that require iteration.
Next Section - 2.8. Summary