> 1) If I can load all the data into memory, using say a hash table, > then the initial load time will be somewhat significant but the > lookups will be near instantaneous.
Really shouldn't be too hard to load the OP's 41,000 very short strings nearly instantaneously. > I had a situation where I had about 170,000 unique strings that > mapped to 170,000 other strings. > > My first implementation used Objective-C++ and a C++ STL map to do > the lookup (solution 1). Depending on the machine, it took on the > order of 2 to 7 seconds of time during the app launch to load the C++ > map. Seems to me that would be either long strings, or inefficient use of STL. Did you try to profile it and optimize it? For instance, if you used map< string, string > the insertions would likely take up all the time in copying strings, and map< string *, string * > would be an easy optimization. Not quite so easy (but still not hard) is reading the whole file in one block, replacing field/record delimiters with null chars, and initializing const char * pointers into the single block, so you never even copy the strings once, then you use map< char *, char *, comparefunc >. Of course OP's "index" strings can all be represented as integers, which would make the comparisons for inserts faster than string comparisons. In fact, for 5-digit zip codes it's perfectly possible to just allocate an array large enough to hold entries for all possible integers in the range 0 through 99,999. No comparisons while reading and building the array, and just O(1) time to "find" an entry. Of course for 9-digit zip codes, this wouldn't be such a great idea ;-) -- Scott Ribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.killerbytes.com/ (303) 722-0567 voice _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
