Traditionally the hcreate() function creates a hash table that uses
chaining, using a fixed user-provided size. The problem with this
approach is that this often either wastes memory (table too big) or
yields bad performance (table too small). For applications it may not
always be easy to estimate the right hash table size. A fixed number
only increases performance compared to a linked list by a constant
factor.
This problem can be solved easily by dynamically resizing the hash
table. If the size of the hash table is at least doubled, this has no
negative on the running time complexity. If a dynamically sized hash
table is used, we can also switch to using open addressing instead of
chaining, which has the advantage of just using a single allocation for
the entire table, instead of allocating many small objects.
Finally, a problem with the existing implementation is that its
deterministic algorithm for hashing makes it possible to come up with
fixed patterns to trigger an excessive number of collisions. We can
easily solve this by using FNV-1a as a hashing algorithm in combination
with a randomly generated offset basis.
Measurements have shown that this implementation is about 20-25% faster
than the existing implementation (even if the existing implementation is
given an excessive number of buckets). Though it allocates more memory
through malloc() than the old implementation (between 4-8 pointers per
used entry instead of 3), process memory use is similar to the old
implementation as if the estimated size was underestimated by a factor
10. This is due to the fact that malloc() needs to perform less
bookkeeping.
Reviewed by: jilles, pfg
Obtained from: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4644