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Use cases
Remember, if you were storing these names in a list of people who have
voted, this function would
eventually become really slow, because it
would have to run a simple search over the entire list. But you’re storing
their
names in a hash table instead, and a hash table instantly tells you
whether this person’s name is in the hash table or not. Checking for
duplicates is very fast with a hash table.
Using hash tables as a cache
One final use case: caching. If you work on a website, you
may have heard of caching before as a good thing to do.
Here’s the idea. Suppose you visit facebook.com:
1. You make a request to Facebook’s server.
2. The server thinks for a second and comes up with
the web page to send to you.
3. You get a web page.
For example,
on Facebook, the server may be collecting all of your
friends’ activity to show you. It takes a couple of seconds to collect all
that activity and shows it to you. That couple
of seconds can feel like a
long time as a user. You might think, “Why is Facebook being so slow?”
On the other hand, Facebook’s servers have
to serve millions of people,
and that couple of seconds adds up for them. Facebook’s servers are
really working hard to serve all of those websites. Is there a way to make
Facebook faster and have its servers do less work at the same time?
Suppose you have a niece who keeps asking you about planets. “How far
is Mars from Earth?” “How far is the Moon?” “How far is Jupiter?” Each
time, you have to do a Google search and give her an answer.
It takes
