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I executed a linear search on an array containing all unique elements in range [1, 10000], sorted in increasing order with all search values i.e., from 1 to 10000 and plotted the runtime vs search value graph as follows:
Upon closely analysing the zoomed in version of the plot as follows:
I found that the runtime for some larger search values is smaller than the lower search values and vice versa
My best guess for this phenomenon is that it is related to how data is processed by CPU using primary memory and cache, but don't have a firm quantifiable reason to explain this.
Any hint would be greatly appreciated.
PS: The code was written in C++ and executed on linux platform hosted on virtual machine with 4 VCPUs on Google Cloud. The runtime was measured using the C++ Chrono library.
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If we know nothing about the distribution of key values, then we have just proved that binary search is the best algorithm available for searching a sorted array.
Binary search is faster than linear search except for small arrays. However, the array must be sorted first to be able to apply binary search. There are specialized data structures designed for fast searching, such as hash tables, that can be searched more efficiently than binary search.
An Efficient Solution can find the required element in O(Log n) time. The idea is to use Binary Search.
The main reason why binary search (which requires sorted data in a data structure with O(1) random access reads) is O(log N) is that for any given data set, we start by looking at the middle-most element.
CPU cache size depends on the CPU model, there are several cache levels, so your experiment should take all those factors into account. L1 cache is usually 8 KiB, which is about 4 times smaller than your 10000 array. But I don't think this is cache misses. L2 latency is about 100ns, which is much smaller than the difference between lowest and second line, which is about 5 usec. I suppose this (second line-cloud) is contributed from the context switching. The longer the task, the more probable the context switching to occur. This is why the cloud on the right side is thicker.
Now for the zoomed in figure. As Linux is not a real time OS, it's time measuring is not very reliable. IIRC it's minimal reporting unit is microsecond. Now, if a certain task takes exactly 15.45 microseconds, then its ending time depends on when it started. If the task started at exact zero time clock, the time reported would be 15 microseconds. If it started when the internal clock was at 0.1 microsecond in, than you will get 16 microsecond. What you see on the graph is a linear approximation of the analogue straight line to the discrete-valued axis. So the tasks duration you get is not actual task duration, but the real value plus task start time into microsecond (which is uniformly distributed ~U[0,1]) and all that rounded to the closest integer value.
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