Re^8: elsif chain vs. dispatch

Yes, if I understand your point correctly: There is no absolute guarantee that all keys won't hash to the same hash key until the keys are absolutely unique! Correct!

However in a practical sense, I think that you are going to be hard pressed to come up with a realistic example for this user's input data.

Of course there is a "trick" here. Even if the hash table has to compare say 16 things to get a result, it is still going to be very fast!

This idea that say 256 things will hash into an identical hash table entry is unlikely. Now "very, very seldom" doesn't mean "never".

But, as the hash grows the probability of this decreases exponentially.

Comment on Re^8: elsif chain vs. dispatch

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Re^9: elsif chain vs. dispatch by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 27, 2009 at 23:36 UTC
However in a practical sense, I think that you are going to be hard pressed to come up with a realistic example for this user's input data. Accidentally, sure. But a intentionally, you have a DOS attack. That's why the fix is called a security fix.	[reply]
Re^10: elsif chain vs. dispatch by Marshall (Canon) on Apr 28, 2009 at 00:02 UTC
Accidentally, sure. But a intentionally, you have a DOS attack. That's why the fix is called a security fix. ~~I am not a Windoze fan. Microsoft calls "security fixes" O/S updates or O/S upgrades. I don't know what you mean by "DOS attack"?~~ update: mis-interpreted a previous post caused by just missing an update on the thread.	[reply]
Re^11: elsif chain vs. dispatch by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 28, 2009 at 00:16 UTC
Denial of Service (updated link with lc "o").	[reply]
Re^11: elsif chain vs. dispatch by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 28, 2009 at 00:16 UTC
Denial-of-Service attack. An attack that degrades the availability of a service. It was possible to intentionally trigger the degenerate case, and thus it could have been possible cause a service to spend a lot of time doing nothing. Take for example a caching proxy written in Perl. By placing requests for carefully crafted urls, it could have been possible to negatively affect the performance of the proxy. At no cost, the fix in 5.8.1 prevents this from happening. ( In no way does the OP have to worry about any of this )	[reply]
Re^9: elsif chain vs. dispatch by JavaFan (Canon) on Apr 28, 2009 at 00:14 UTC
Yes, if I understand your point correctly: There is no absolute guarantee that all keys won't hash to the same hash key until the keys are absolutely unique! Correct! You understood me utterly wrong. The claim was made Perl detects if too many keys hash to the same bucket, the hash is expanded in size and the keys reinserted, spreading over more buckets. I then pointed out that the description of how it's done still means that you can have enough keys map to the same bucket so your lookup isn't constant anymore. This idea that say 256 things will hash into an identical hash table entry is unlikely. Now "very, very seldom" doesn't mean "never". Yes, and? We were talking about a worst case scenario. And a worst case scenario could be anything that doesn't never happen.	[reply]
Re^10: elsif chain vs. dispatch by Marshall (Canon) on Apr 28, 2009 at 04:49 UTC
The claim was made Perl detects if too many keys hash to the same bucket, the hash is expanded in size and the keys reinserted, spreading over more buckets. Where did that idea come up? If Perl detects num_entries > num_buckets, that will trigger more buckets.	[reply]