Linear Probing Revisited: Tombstones Mark the Death of Primary Clustering
Michael A. Bender,
Bradley C. Kuszmaul,
William Kuszmaul
Abstract:First introduced in 1954, the linear-probing hash table is among the oldest data structures in computer science, and thanks to its unrivaled data locality, linear probing continues to be one of the fastest hash tables in practice. It is widely believed and taught, however, that linear probing should never be used at high load factors; this is because of an effect known as primary clustering which causes insertions at a load factor of 1 − 1/x to take expected time Θ(x 2 ) (rather than the intuitive running time… Show more
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