Efficient algorithm to get primes between two large numbers

Question

I'm a beginner in C#, I'm trying to write an application to get primes between two numbers entered by the user. The problem is: At large numbers (valid numbers are in the range from 1 to 1000000000) getting the primes takes long time and according to the problem I'm solving, the whole operation must be carried out in a small time interval. This is the problem link for more explanation: SPOJ-Prime

And here's the part of my code that's responsible of getting primes:

  public void GetPrime()
    {            
        int L1 = int.Parse(Limits[0]);
        int L2 = int.Parse(Limits[1]);

        if (L1 == 1)
        {
            L1++;
        }

        for (int i = L1; i <= L2; i++)
        {
            for (int k = L1; k <= L2; k++)
            {
                if (i == k)
                {
                    continue;
                }
                else if (i % k == 0)
                {
                    flag = false;
                    break;
                }
                else
                {
                    flag = true;
                }
            }

            if (flag)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(i);
            }
        }
    }

Is there any faster algorithm? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You are doing a lot of extra divisions that are not needed - if you know a number is not divisible by 3, there is no point in checking if it is divisible by 9, 27, etc. You should try to divide only by the potential prime factors of the number. Cache the set of primes you are generating and only check division by the previous primes. Note that you do need to generate the initial set of primes below L1.

Remember that no number will have a prime factor that's greater than its own square root, so you can stop your divisions at that point. For instance, you can stop checking potential factors of the number 29 after 5.

You also do can increment by 2 so you can disregard checking if an even number is prime altogether (special casing the number 2, of course.)

I used to ask this question during interviews - as a test I compared an implementation similar to yours with the algorithm I described. With the optimized algorithm, I could generate hundreds of thousands of primes very fast - I never bothered waiting around for the slow, straightforward implementation.