HashMap collision speed (regression 7->8)

[Martin Buchholz]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 4:20 PM, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:

> On 01/09/2015 06:29 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
>
>> Given the prevalence of sub-optimal hashcodes, my own intuition is also
>> that
>> raising the treeification threshold from 8 will be a win.
>>
>
> That's what I thought at first. But 8 is a better choice for String
> and other Comparable keys, which account for the majority of HashMaps
> out there. (For non-comparables, infinity is the best threshold.)
>

Non-malicious Strings are only rarely going to end up in treebins, because
their hash codes are not awful (just sub-optimal - hmmm ... is anyone
putting all possible 2-char Strings into a HashMap?).  I'm not convinced
that comparableClassFor should special-case Strings.

Linear search through a non-treebin of non-malicious Strings is likely to
be fast, because we will short-circuit if hash codes or length don't match,
which compareTo cannot.  So compareTo is likely to have more overhead per
element, although of course in the end log(N) beats N.