Ben Wendt's blog

It’s often useful to time aspects of your applications. In environments without access to profiling tools like xdebug, it is necessary to roll your own. Here’s one that relies heavily on calls to microtime. Unfortunately making many thousands of calls to microtime takes a significant amount of time on its own.

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Java has a nifty class named NavigableMap. It abstracts away some of the logic for mapping ranges to values. Java is reknowned for it’s ridiculously large library of collections.

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A bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure meant for checking whether a given entry does not occur in a list. It is meant to be quite fast, and is used as a way of not doing costly queries when it can be determined that no results will be returned. E.g., if you could turn this:

costly_lookup(key)

Into this:

if (!cheap_check_that_key_isnt_there()) {
    costly_lookup()
}

Then that’s a win.

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