Arrays vs tuples / lists

[Thomas Johnsson]

Hi,
thanks for doing the benchmarking for me.
One note: the ets lookup is done with
   [X] = ets:lookup(Tab, Pos),
which involves a pattern matching on the lhs, that has a cost.
Could you re-run it on the same box, with
    X = head(ets:lookup(Tab, Pos)),

or some such? Head must do a similar check, but presumably it is cheaper.

-- Thomas

>
> Ok, that was perhaps a bit too terse, but I was sitting with
> an impatient baby in my lap (she hasn't quite grasped the
> beauty of Erlang yet, but I'm working on it.)
>
> test:tup(Iterations, DataSize) runs a tight loop accessing
> objects via element/2 in a tuple with 10,000 elements.
>
> test:ets/2 does the same thing, but with an ets set containing
> 10,000 objects.
>
> Due to the very limited precision of erlang:now() on my
> windows box, I ran 1,000 iterations where I accessed all
> 10,000 objects each iterations.
>
> As you can see, tuple accesses are independent of data size,
> as the data already resides on the process heap. With ets,
> there is always copying, so as the object size increases, so
> does the cost of a lookup.
>
> Even with the smallest type of payload (an atom), element/2
> is nearly an order of magnitude faster than ets:lookup/2.
>
> Note, this is only read access. As soon as you start using
> setelement/3 on a tuple of size 10,000, the picture shifts
> rather dramatically.
>
> /Uffe
>
>
> On Mon, 17 May 2004 21:14:11 +0200, Ulf Wiger <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 17 May 2004 18:13:01 +0200 (CEST), Thomas Johnsson
>> <thomas@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> As long as you only look up stuff in large tuples,
>>>> access is very fast and O(1).
>>>
>>> Splendid! Presumably it is faster than an ets table lookup with an
>>> integer
>>> as key; by how much, roughly?
>>>
>>> -- Thomas
>>>
>>
>> Well, it's reasonably easy to measure (at least on UNIX...)
>> (I've enclosed a small test program, and a test run on a 3GHz XP box.)
>>
>> /Uffe
>>
>> Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.3 [threads:0]
>>
>> Eshell V5.3  (abort with ^G)
>> 1> cd("c:/cygwin/home/foo/erl").
>> c:/cygwin/home/foo/erl
>> ok
>> 2> c(test).
>> {ok,test}
>> 3> test:tup(1000,small).
>> {625000,ok}
>> 4> test:tup(1000,medium).
>> {609000,ok}
>> 5> test:tup(1000,big).
>> {609000,ok}
>> 6> test:ets(1000,small).
>> {4156000,ok}
>> 7> test:ets(1000,medium).
>> {8718000,ok}
>> 8> test:ets(1000,big).
>> {138594000,ok}
>> 9> test:empty(1000).
>> {531000,ok}
>> 10>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Ulf Wiger
>
>