Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Hashmap vs LinkedHashMap

During development of one my project I got confused and annoyed,I was displaying the contents of Hashmap,I was amazed to see the order in which the contents were displayed.
After hours of brain-storming I came to conclusion that there is no guarantee of elements on Hashmap.Here are there few conclusion I had found.

A LinkedHashMap differs from HashMap in that the order of elements is maintained.
A HashMap has a better performance than a LinkedHashMap because a LinkedHashMap needs the expense of maintaining the linked list. The LinkedHashMap implements a normal hashtable, but with the added benefit of the keys of the hashtable being stored as a doubly-linked list.
Both of their methods are not synchronized.
Let's take a look their API documentations:

The HashMap is a hash table with buckets in each hash slot. Like in the API documentation:

This implementation provides constant-time performance for the basic operations (get and put), assuming the hash function disperses the elements properly among the buckets. Iteration over collection views requires time proportional to the "capacity" of the HashMap instance (the number of buckets) plus its size (the number of key-value mappings). Thus, it's very important not to set the initial capacity too high (or the load factor too low) if iteration performance is important.

The LinkedHashMap is a linked list implementing the map interface. As said in the API documentation:

Hash table and linked list implementation of the Map interface, with predictable iteration order. This implementation differs from HashMap in that it maintains a doubly-linked list running through all of its entries. This linked list defines the iteration ordering, which is normally the order in which keys were inserted into the map (insertion-order).

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