Question

I need to insert 10-million strings into a C++ STL set. The strings are sorted. Will I have a pathological problem if I insert the strings in sorted order? Should I randomize first? Or will the G++ STL implementation automatically rebalance for me?

Answer 1

The only question I have: do you really need a set ?

If the data is already sorted and you don’t need to insert / delete elements after the creation, a deque would be better:

• you’ll have the same big-O complexity using a binary search for retrieval
• you’ll get less memory overhead… and better cache locality

On binary_search: I suspect you need more than a ForwardIterator for a binary search, guess this site is off again 🙁