Re (tilly) 3: Efficiency Question

[tilly]

Fastest and smallest are incompatible.

Also do you need at least 30, or exactly?

If I wanted to be bare bones I would do something like this untested code:

use strict;
use vars qw($max_size $reset_size);
$max_size = 60;
$reset_size = 30;
{
  my %count;
  my %cache;

  sub get_elem {
    my $id = shift;
    if (exists $count{$id}) {
      ++$count{$id};
      return $cache{$id};
    }
    else{
      return;
    }
  }

  my $size;
  sub set_elem {
    {
      my $id = shift;
      my $elem = shift;
      if (exists $count{$id}) {
        $cache{$id} = $elem;
      }
      else {
        if ($max_size < ++$size) {
          _clear_cache();
        }
        $count{$id} = 0;
        $cache{$id} = $elem;
      }
      redo if @_;
    }
  }

  sub _clear_cache {
    my @ids = sort {$count{$b} <=> $count{$a}} keys %count;
    @ids = @ids[0..($reset_size-1)];
    my %new;
    %count = ();
    foreach (@ids) {
      $new{$_} = $cache{$_};
      $count{$_} = 0;
    }
    %cache = %new;
    $size = $reset_size;
  }
}

Note that I go over 30 here, but doing so makes the actual lookup much faster.

[MeowChow]

You can speed up the _clear_cache, which would in probably eat up the most cycles, being called once every 30 insertions, like so:

sub clear_cache {
  my @ids = sort {$count{$b} <=> $count{$a}} keys %count;
  splice @ids, 0, $reset_size-1;
  delete @cache{@ids};
  %count = ();
  @count{keys %cache} = (0) x $reset_size;
  $size = $reset_size;
}

Faster to delete elements from an existing hash, I've found, than to rebuild a hash. This of course depends mostly on the ratio of deleted/total hash entries.

Also, this is isn't quite a frequency-expiration cache, since time is not a factor into the expiration routine, and you would stand a pretty good chance of getting stale cache entries that once had a bunch of hits, but remain in the cache even though they are entirely unused. I'd probably switch the count over to something like a shift-based MRU, called once every 30 fetches:

my $do_shift = 0;
sub get_elem {
  my $id = shift;
  if (++$do_shift == 30) {
    shift_mru();
    $do_shift = 0;
  }
  if (exists $count{$id}) {
    $count{$id} |= 0x80000000;
    return $cache{$id};
  }
  else{
    return;
  }
}

sub shift_mru {
  while (my ($id, $count) = each %count) {
    $count{$id} >>= 1;
  }
}

I also seem to recall that there are ways to optimize the sorting algorithm for a return of fewer results than the total number to be sorted, but that's getting rather hairy :-)

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print