Re: Fastest way to clone a hash_map

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:58:49 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<cfb025b8-cca7-472b-ba30-42db2e5780c6@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>
On Apr 29, 5:33 pm, devdude <rottygu...@yahoo.com> wrote:

I have the need to take a snapshot of a hash_map during
execution (actually transform it to a vector). This map is a
shared resource and therefore must be locked prior to any
read/write operations thus I need to minimize the amount of
time the map resource is locked.

The map is defined as type <string,
boost::shared_ptr<myobject>>. My algorithm is as such:

void SnapShotToVector( vector< pair< string,
boost::shared_ptr<myobject> >& vec )
{
   lockResource(this->map);
   vec.resize( map.size() );
   copy(this->map.begin(), this->map.end(),list.begin());
   unlockResource(this->map);
}


(Just a nit, but you really should use some sort of scoped lock
here. Both the resize and the copy can throw an exception,
leaving your resource forever locked.)

For about 3M elements w/in the map, I'm noticing that the
resize op takes about 150ms and the copy takes ~850ms. Is
there any way to do better? I suppose the total time doesn' t
matter as it's the time the resource is actually locked is the
primary concern.


There are really only two solutions: what you've done, and:

    vec.reserve( map.size() ) ;
    std::copy( map.begin(), map.end(),
               std::back_inserter( vec ) );

Which one will be faster will depend on the implementation of
std::vector and std::string, so you'll have to measure. But
you're not going to get any order of magnitude gains.

You might also gain a little by resizing once before locking
(with perhaps a fudge factor, to allow for the map growing while
you're resizing):

    size_t trialSize ;
    lockResource( map ) ;
    trialSize = 1.2 * map.size() ) ;
    unlockResource( map ) ;
    vec.resize( trialSize ) ;
    lockResource( map ) ;
    vec.resize( map.size() ) ;
    copy( map.begin(), map.end(), vec.begin() ) ;
    unlockResource( map ) ;

The resize in the locked zone should only change the size a
little, and hopefully will not increase it, so you'll only call
a few destructors.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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