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11.4: Profiling MyHashMap

  • Page ID
    12795
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    Before we go on, we should check whether MyHashMap.put is really constant time.

    Run ant build to compile the source files. Then run ant ProfileMapPut. It measures the run time of HashMap.put (provided by Java) with a range of problem sizes, and plots run time versus problem size on a log-log scale. If this operation is constant time, the total time for n operations should be linear, so the result should be a straight line with slope 1. When I ran this code, the estimated slope was close to 1, which is consistent with our analysis. You should get something similar.

    Modify ProfileMapPut.java so it profiles your implementation, MyHashMap, instead of Java’s HashMap. Run the profiler again and see if the slope is near 1.

    You might have to adjust startN and endMillis to find a range of problem sizes where the run times are more than a few milliseconds, but not more than a few thousand.

    When I ran this code, I got a surprise: the slope was about 1.7, which suggests that this implementation is not constant time after all. It contains a “performance bug”.

    Before you read the next section, you should track down the error, fix it, and confirm that put is now constant time, as expected.


    This page titled 11.4: Profiling MyHashMap is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Allen B. Downey (Green Tea Press) .

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