I feel the use of Hash might not be required for your task. You have recordID which can act as an index to an array so why put them in a hash and mess up the order? You get linear access in array using index anyways an no overhead of the hash-table

That said, i would do a Matrix(nxn) (square not a requirement, dimensions might change based on num of records of course) to keep track of scores. Consider the following table

File1rec/File2rec123456
13789910
2483116
3149497
44310723
5425995
6562569
The values inside the cell are the scores. Now if you want the best matching score (max value) then a O(n) max will provide you the answer for your records and you have to do that n-times for each record in your first file.

Sorting to finx max/min is an overkill. I might be missing your porblem so please correct me if i am wrong.

cheers

SK

In reply to Re: How can I improve the efficiency of this very intensive code? by sk
in thread How can I improve the efficiency of this very intensive code? by clearcache

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