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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:30:19+00:00

I want a data structure that will allow querying how many items in last

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I want a data structure that will allow querying how many items in last X minutes. An item may just be a simple identifier or a more complex data structure, preferably the timestamp of the item will be in the item, rather than stored outside (as a hash or similar, wouldn’t want to have problems with multiple items having same timestamp).

So far it seems that with LINQ I could easily filter items with timestamp greater than a given time and aggregate a count. Though I’m hesitant to try to work .NET 3.5 specific stuff into my production environment yet. Are there any other suggestions for a similar data structure?

The other part that I’m interested in is aging old data out, If I’m only going to be asking for counts of items less than 6 hours ago I would like anything older than that to be removed from my data structure because this may be a long-running program.

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1 Answer

  1. A simple linked list can be used for this.

    Basically you add new items to the end, and remove too old items from the start, it is a cheap data structure.

    example-code:

    list.push_end(new_data) while list.head.age >= age_limit:     list.pop_head()

    If the list will be busy enough to warrant chopping off larger pieces than one at a time, then I agree with dmo, use a tree structure or something similar that allows pruning on a higher level.

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