插入多集的运行时

Question

What is the overall runtime of inserting into a multi set, lets say I am going over a billion elements and inserting into multi-set, which maintains a sorted ordering. What is my worst case runtime?

Answer 1

According to http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/MultipleAssociativeContainer.html the complexity of insert is O(log n) for inserting a single element; for inserting a sequence of length N, it is O(N log n).

If you really want the time, and not the asymptotic complexity, you can time it for a different values - 1000, 10,000 - say, and then compute the constants of proportionality from there. The actual equation will be t = A n log n + C.

But of course the next time you run on different hardware the values of A and C will change.