Best performance on a String Dictionary in C#

Question

I am designing a C# class that contains a string hierarchy, where each string has 0 or 1 parents.

My inclination is to implement this with a Dictionary<string,string> where the key is the child and value is the parent. The dictionary may have a large amount of values, but I can't say the exact size. This seems like it should perform faster than creating composite wrapper with references to the parent, but I could be wrong.

Is there an alternative approach I can take that will ensure better performance speed?

Answer 1

Retrieving values from a Dictionary<K,V> is extremely fast (close to O(1), ie, almost constant time lookup regardless of the size of the collection) because the underlying implementation uses a hash table. Of course, if the key type uses a terrible hashing algorithm than the performance can degrade, but you can rest assured that this is likely not the case for the framework's string type.

However, as I asked in my comment, you need to answer a few questions:

1. Define what performance metric is most important, ie, Time (CPU) or space (memory).
2. What are your requirements? How will this be used? What's your worst case scenario? Is this going to hold a ton of data with relatively infrequent lookups, do many lookups need to be performed in a short amount of time, or do both hold true?

The Dictionary<K,V> class also uses an array internally which will grow as you add items. Is this okay for you? Again, you need to be more specific in terms of your requirements before anyone can give you a complete answer.

Answer 2

Using a Dictionary will be slower than using direct references, because the Dictionary will have to compute a hash etc. If you really only need the parent and not the child's operation (which I doubt), then you could store the Strings in an array together with the index of the parent String.