Hashset vs Treeset

Question

I've always loved trees, that nice O(n*log(n)) and the tidiness of them. However, every software engineer I've ever known has asked me pointedly why I would use a TreeSet. From a CS background, I don't think it matters all that much which you use, and I don't care to mess around with hash functions and buckets (in the case of Java).

In which cases should I use a HashSet over a TreeSet?

Answer 1

HashSet is much faster than TreeSet (constant-time versus log-time for most operations like add, remove and contains) but offers no ordering guarantees like TreeSet.

HashSet

• the class offers constant time performance for the basic operations (add, remove, contains and size).
• it does not guarantee that the order of elements will remain constant over time
• iteration performance depends on the initial capacity and the load factor of the HashSet.
  • It's quite safe to accept default load factor but you may want to specify an initial capacity that's about twice the size to which you expect the set to grow.

TreeSet

• guarantees log(n) time cost for the basic operations (add, remove and contains)
• guarantees that elements of set will be sorted (ascending, natural, or the one specified by you via its constructor) (implements SortedSet)
• doesn't offer any tuning parameters for iteration performance
• offers a few handy methods to deal with the ordered set like first(), last(), headSet(), and tailSet() etc

Important points:

• Both guarantee duplicate-free collection of elements
• It is generally faster to add elements to the HashSet and then convert the collection to a TreeSet for a duplicate-free sorted traversal.
• None of these implementations are synchronized. That is if multiple threads access a set concurrently, and at least one of the threads modifies the set, it must be synchronized externally.
• LinkedHashSet is in some sense intermediate between HashSet and TreeSet. Implemented as a hash table with a linked list running through it, however,it provides insertion-ordered iteration which is not same as sorted traversal guaranteed by TreeSet.

So a choice of usage depends entirely on your needs but I feel that even if you need an ordered collection then you should still prefer HashSet to create the Set and then convert it into TreeSet.

• e.g. SortedSet<String> s = new TreeSet<String>(hashSet);

Answer 2

One advantage not yet mentioned of a TreeSet is that its has greater "locality", which is shorthand for saying (1) if two entries are nearby in the order, a TreeSet places them near each other in the data structure, and hence in memory; and (2) this placement takes advantage of the principle of locality, which says that similar data is often accessed by an application with similar frequency.

This is in contrast to a HashSet, which spreads the entries all over memory, no matter what their keys are.

When the latency cost of reading from a hard drive is thousands of times the cost of reading from cache or RAM, and when the data really is accessed with locality, the TreeSet can be a much better choice.