{"id":168817,"date":"2014-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/a-back-to-basics-empirical-study-of-priority-queues\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T21:05:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T04:05:32","slug":"a-back-to-basics-empirical-study-of-priority-queues","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/a-back-to-basics-empirical-study-of-priority-queues\/","title":{"rendered":"A Back-to-Basics Empirical Study of Priority Queues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The theory community has proposed several new heap variants in the recent past which have remained largely untested experimentally.  We take the field back to the drawing board, with straightforward implementations of both classic and novel structures using only standard, well-known  optimizations.   We  study  the  behavior  of each structure on a variety of inputs, including artificial workloads, workloads generated by running algorithms on real map data, and workloads from a discrete event simulator  used  in  recent  systems  networking  research. We  provide  observations  about  which  characteristics are  most  correlated  to  performance.<\/p>\n<p>For  example, we  find  that  the  L1  cache  miss  rate  appears  to  be strongly correlated with wallclock time. We also provide observations about how the input sequence affects the relative performance of the different heap variants.  For example,  we show (both theoretically and in practice) that  certain  random  insertion-deletion  sequences  are degenerate and can lead to misleading results.  Overall, our findings suggest that while the conventional wisdom holds in some cases, it is sorely mistaken in others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The theory community has proposed several new heap variants in the recent past which have remained largely untested experimentally. We take the field back to the drawing board, with straightforward implementations of both classic and novel structures using only standard, well-known optimizations. We study the behavior of each structure on a variety of inputs, including [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"Proc. 16th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX)","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"Proc. 16th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX)","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"Proc. 16th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX)","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"Daniel Larkin, Robert E. 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