Sliding Block (Slick) Hashing: An Implementation & Benchmarks

TL;DR

This paper presents an implementation and benchmark analysis of Slick Hash, a lightweight hash table designed to optimize space and speed, including evaluation of entry deletion and cleaning effects.

Contribution

It provides the first practical implementation and performance evaluation of Slick Hash, bridging theoretical concepts with real-world benchmarking.

Findings

Slick Hash achieves a good balance between space and speed.

Entry deletion impacts performance depending on cleaning strategies.

Benchmark results compare Slick Hash with traditional hash tables.

Abstract

With hash tables being one of the most used data structures, Lehmann, Sanders and Walzer propose a novel, light-weight hash table, referred to as Slick Hash. Their idea is to hit a sweet spot between space consumption and speed. Building on the theoretical ideas by the authors, an implementation and experiments are required to evaluate the practical performance of Slick Hash. This work contributes to fulfilling this requirement by providing a basic implementation of Slick Hash, an analysis of its performance, and an evaluation of the entry deletion, focusing on the impact of backyard cleaning. The findings are discussed, and a conclusion is drawn.