Re: [Boost-users] Boost or Standard when there is the choice?

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Boost or Standard when there is the choice?
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-02-16 13:51:22

On 16 February 2014 17:25, Joaquin M Lopez Munoz <joaquin_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> I think this nos the story the benchmarks tell. 15 different scenarios were
> tested:
>
> * Insertion without rehashing, unique elements
> * Insertion with rehashing, unique elements
> * Insertion without rehashing, duplicate elements
> * Insertion without rehashing, duplicate elements, high load factor
> * Insertion with rehashing, duplicate elements
> * Insertion with rehashing, duplicate elements, high load factor
> * Erasure, unique elements
> * Erasure, dupicate elements
> * Erasure, dupicate elements, high load factor
> * Successful lookup, unique elements
> * Unsuccessful lookup, unique elements
> * Successful lookup, duplicate elements
> * Unsuccessful lookup, duplicate elements
> * Successful lookup, duplicate elements, high load factor
> * Unsuccessful lookup, duplicate elements, high load factor
>
> and results do not show any definite winner (< means "better than"):

Well, of course I mostly noticed the results where Boost.Unordered did
worse. I also wasn't paying much attention to the results for
duplicate elements as I've found that most people don't care about
them at all. One of the annoying things I've found is that the things
I've spent time optimising are the things that users never benchmark.
I think yours are the first benchmarks I've seen to deal with elements
with equivalent keys. But what I'm not sure about, is how closely
benchmarks reflect actual use.

A minor dilemma that I've got at the moment is that on 64-bit machines
the newer versions use a different bucket placement strategy to avoid
the costly prime modulus. It's typically faster, but for certain cases
(such as inserting consecutive integers) the old version is much
faster as there are no collisions at all. The problem is I have no
idea how often this happens in real world cases. It seems like
something that will happen fairly often, so I could put in a special
case for integers, but that would result in a performance hit for less
regular numbers.