5.2: Profiling LinkedList methods
- Page ID
- 12751
In the previous exercise you also profiled the performance of adding new elements at the beginning of a LinkedList. Based on our analysis, we expect each add to take constant time, because in a linked list, we don’t have to shift the existing elements; we can just add a new node at the beginning. So we expect the total time for n adds to be linear.
Here’s a solution:
public static void profileLinkedListAddBeginning() { Timeable timeable = new Timeable() { List<String> list; public void setup(int n) { list = new LinkedList<String>(); } public void timeMe(int n) { for (int i=0; i<n; i++) { list.add(0, "a string"); } } }; int startN = 128000; int endMillis = 2000; runProfiler("LinkedList add beginning", timeable, startN, endMillis); }
We only had a make a few changes, replacing ArrayList with LinkedList and adjusting startN and endMillis to get a good range of data. The measurements were noisier than the previous batch; here are the results:
128000, 16 256000, 19 512000, 28 1024000, 77 2048000, 330 4096000, 892 8192000, 1047 16384000, 4755
Figure 5.3.1 shows the graph of these results.
It’s not a very straight line, and the slope is not exactly 1; the slope of the least squares fit is 1.23. But these results indicate that the total time for n adds is at least approximately \( O(n) \), so each add is constant time.