Re: [rfc] Near-constant time directory index for Ext2

[Daniel Phillips <phillips@innominate.de>]

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> 
>     Just looking at R5 I knew it wasn't going to do well in this application
>     because it's similar to a number of hash functions I tried with the same
>     idea in mind: to place similar names together in the same leaf block.
>     That turned out to be not very important compared to achieving a
>     relatively high fullness of leaf blocks.  The problem with R5 when used
>     with my htree is, it doesn't give very uniform dispersal.
> 
>     The bottom line: dx_hack_hash is still the reigning champion.
> 
> Now that you provide source for r5 and dx_hack_hash, let me feed my
> collections to them.
> r5: catastrophic
> dx_hack_hash: not bad, but the linear hash is better.

I never expected dx_hack_hash to be particularly good at anything, but
we might as well test the version without the mistake in it - I was
previously using < 0 to test the sign bit - on an unsigned variable :-/

unsigned dx_hack_hash (const char *name, int len)
{
	u32 hash0 = 0x12a3fe2d, hash1 = 0x37abe8f9;
	while (len--)
	{
		u32 hash = hash1 + (hash0 ^ (*name++ * 71523));
		if (hash & 0x80000000) hash -= 0x7fffffff;
		hash1 = hash0;
		hash0 = hash;
	}
	return hash0;
}


The correction gained me another 1% in the leaf block fullness measure. 
I will try your hash with the htree index code tomorrow.

--
Daniel