Improving the check if an object is in a Set/HashMap data structure in Ruby by using better comparisons, memoization, and object orientation practices

blog@johnjr.dev (John Jr) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:04:03 -0400

I was verifying the performance of an endpoint in an API using framegraph when I noticed that checking if an object is in a set or a hash data structure was consuming a lot of time. This post explains the problem and the solution to it.

First of all, checking if an object is in a Set or HashMap is O(1) when we don’t consider collisions. Even in the presence of collisions, it should be much less than O(n), where n is the number of items in the set. Otherwise, we are operating as a linked list.

HashMap on John Jr

Improving the check if an object is in a Set/HashMap data structure in Ruby by using better comparisons, memoization, and object orientation practices