I have a large txt (ipaddress.txt) with a lot of lines, each line is a IP Address, eg.:
44.XXX.XXX.XXX
45.XXX.XXX.XXX
46.XXX.XXX.XXX
47.XXX.XXX.XXX
48.XXX.XXX.XXX
i load this list in a TStringList, eg.:
FIpAddressList := TStringList.Create();
FIpAddressList.Sorted := true;
FIpAddressList.LoadFromFile('ipaddress.txt');
and i want check if a IP Address is in the list, eg.:
function IsIPinList(const IPAddress : string): Boolean;
begin
Result := (FIpAddressList.IndexOf(IPAddress) <> -1);
end;
it works... but is slow with huge TStringList.
Is there any way to make this process faster?
UPDATE
The list is static with monthly update, with less or more 5'000 lines.
The function is invoked at each request on a server (eg. 5 times per seconds).
The list is loaded only when the server service start.
One way to make this quicker is to arrange for the list to be sorted so that the search can be performed using binary search, O(log n), rather than linear search, O(n).
If the list is static then the best thing to do is to sort the list outside your program so that you can sort it exactly once.
If the list is more dynamic then you will have to sort it, and keep any modifications ordered. In this scenario, sorting the list will only bring benefits if the number of searches you make is sufficient to overcome the extra cost of sorting and maintaining the order.
Another approach is to use dictionary containing your items. Typically this will involve hashing each string. Whilst the lookup complexity is O(n) the cost of hashing can be significant.
Yet another way to speed things up is to convert the IP address strings to 32 bit integers. In fact this is sure to yield a huge performance benefit, and you should do this irrespective of any other concerns. It is always faster and clearer to work with a 32 bit integer than a string representation of an IP address.
These are just some possible approaches, there are more. Which to choose depends very much on the usage trade offs.
Whilst you probably are just looking for some code to solve your problem, it is my view that this problem is more algorithmic than code based. You need to better understand the requirements, data size constraints, etc. before selecting an algorithm. Once you have decided on an algorithm, or narrowed the choice down to a small number to compare, implementation should be straightforward.
Another possibility is that you have misdiagnosed your problem. Even linear search over a list of 5000 IP addresses stored as strings should be quicker than you are reporting:
My computer can search such a list 2,000 times a second using linear search.
Once you sort the list and switch to binary search, then it can manage 1,000,000 searches a second.
Switch to storing an ordered array of integers, and it achieves over 10,000,000 searches a second.
With a hash based dictionary of integers gives performance twice as fast again.
So, the performance of your search could be improved easily by a factor of 20,000, I still don't think that your performance problems are down to what you believe. I wonder if your real problem that that you are reading the file from disk every time you search.
Related
In the past I had to work with big files, somewhere about in the 0.1-3GB range. Not all the 'columns' were needed so it was ok to fit the remaining data in RAM.
Now I have to work with files in 1-20GB range, and they will probably grow as the time will pass. That is totally different because you cannot fit the data in RAM anymore.
My file contains several millions of 'entries' (I have found one with 30 mil entries). On entry consists in about 10 'columns': one string (50-1000 unicode chars) and several numbers. I have to sort the data by 'column' and show it. For the user only the top entries (1-30%) are relevant, the rest is low quality data.
So, I need some suggestions about in which direction to head out. I definitively don't want to put data in a DB because they are hard to install and configure for non computer savvy persons. I like to deliver a monolithic program.
Showing the data is not difficult at all. But sorting... without loading the data in RAM, on regular PCs (2-6GB RAM)... will kill some good hours.
I was looking a bit into MMF (memory mapped files) but this article from Danny Thorpe shows that it may not be suitable: http://dannythorpe.com/2004/03/19/the-hidden-costs-of-memory-mapped-files/
So, I was thinking about loading only the data from the column that has to be sorted in ram AND a pointer to the address (into the disk file) of the 'entry'. I sort the 'column' then I use the pointer to find the entry corresponding to each column cell and restore the entry. The 'restoration' will be written directly to disk so no additional RAM will be required.
PS: I am looking for a solution that will work both on Lazarus and Delphi because Lazarus (actually FPC) has 64 bit support for Mac. 64 bit means more RAM available = faster sorting.
I think a way to go is Mergesort, it's a great algorithm for sorting a
large amount of fixed records with limited memory.
General idea:
read N lines from the input file (a value that allows you to keep the lines in memory)
sort these lines and write the sorted lines to file 1
repeat with the next N lines to obtain file 2
...
you reach the end of the input file and you now have M files (each of which is sorted)
merge these files into a single file (you'll have to do this in steps as well)
You could also consider a solution based on an embedded database, e.g. Firebird embedded: it works well with Delphi/Windows and you only have to add some DLL in your program folder (I'm not sure about Lazarus/OSX).
If you only need a fraction of the whole data, scan the file sequentially and keep only the entries needed for display. F.I. lets say you need only 300 entries from 1 million. Scan the first first 300 entries in the file and sort them in memory. Then for each remaining entry check if it is lower than the lowest in memory and skip it. If it is higher as the lowest entry in memory, insert it into the correct place inside the 300 and throw away the lowest. This will make the second lowest the lowest. Repeat until end of file.
Really, there are no sorting algorithms that can make moving 30gb of randomly sorted data fast.
If you need to sort in multiple ways, the trick is not to move the data itself at all, but instead to create an index for each column that you need to sort.
I do it like that with files that are also tens of gigabytes long, and users can sort, scroll and search the data without noticing that it's a huge dataset they're working with.
Please finde here a class which sorts a file using a slightly optimized merge sort. I wrote that a couple of years ago for fun. It uses a skip list for sorting files in-memory.
Edit: The forum is german and you have to register (for free). It's safe but requires a bit of german knowledge.
If you cannot fit the data into main memory then you are into the realms of external sorting. Typically this involves external merge sort. Sort smaller chunks of the data in memory, one by one, and write back to disk. And then merge these chunks.
I have a text file sized 300MB, I want to count the occurrences of each 10,000 substrings in the file. I want to know how to do it fast.
Now, I use the following code:
content = IO.read("path/to/mytextfile")
Word.each do |w|
w.occurrence = content.scan(w.name).size
w.save
end
Word is an ActiveRecord class.
It took me almost 1 day to finish the counting. Is there anyway to do it faster? Thanks.
Edit1:
Thank you again. I am running rails 2.3.9. The name filed of words table contains what I am searching for, and it contains only unique values. Instead of using Word.each, I use batch(1000 rows a time) load. It should help.
I rewrited the whole code with the idea from bpaulon. Now it only took a few hours to finish the counting.
I profiled the new version code, now the largest time costing methods are utf8 encode supported string truncating code
def truncate(n)
self.slice(/\A.{0,#{n}}/m)
end
and characters counting code
def utf8_length
self.unpack('U*').size
end
Any other faster methods to replace them?
Your use of scan creates an array, counts the size of it, then throws it away. If you have a lot of occurrences of the substring inside a big file, you will create a big array temporarily, potentially burning up CPU time with memory management, but that should still run pretty quickly, even with 300MB.
Because Word is an ActiveRecord class, it is dependent on the schema and any indexes in your database, plus any issues your database server might be having. If the database is not optimized or is responding slowly or the query used to retrieve the data is not efficient, then the iteration will be slow. You might find it a lot faster to grab groups of Word so they are in RAM, then iterate over them.
And, if the database and your code are running on the same machine, you could be suffering from resource constraints like having only one drive, not enough RAM, etc.
Without knowing more about your environment and hardware it's hard to say.
EDIT:
I can grab the substrings into an array/hash first, then add the count results to the array or hash, and write the results back to database after all the counting is done. You think it be faster, right?
No, I doubt that will help a lot, and, without knowing where the problem lies all you might do is make the problem worse because you'll have to load 10,000 records as objects from the database, then build a 10,000 element hash or array which will also be in memory along with the DB records, then write them out.
Ruby will only use a single core, currently, but you can gain speed by using Ruby 1.9+. I'd recommend installing RVM and letting it manage your Ruby. Be sure to read the instructions on that page, then run rvm notes and follow those directions.
What is your Word model and the underlying schema and indexes look like? Is the database on the same machine?
EDIT: From looking at your table schema, you have no indexes except for id which really won't help much for normal look-ups. I'd recommend presenting your schema on Stack Overflow's sibling site https://dba.stackexchange.com/ and explain what you want to do. At a minimum I'd add a key to the text fields to help avoid full table scans for any searches you do.
What might help more is to read: Retrieving Multiple Objects in Batches from "Active Record Query Interface".
Also, look at the SQL being emitted when your Word.each is running. Is it something like "select * from word"? If so, Rails is pulling in 10,000 records to iterate over them one by one. If it is something like "select * from word where id=1" then for every record you have a database read followed by a write when you update the count. That is the scenario that the "Retrieving Multiple Objects in Batches" link will help fix.
Also, I am guessing that content is the text you are searching for, but I can't tell for sure. Is it possible you have duplicated text values causing you to do scans more than once for the same text? If so, select your records using a unique condition on that field and then update your counts for all matching records at one time.
Have you profiled your code to see if Ruby itself can help you pinpoint the problem? Modify your code a little to process 100 or 1000 records. Start the app with the -r profile flag. When the app exits profiler will output a table showing where time was spent.
What version of Rails are you running?
I think you could approach this problem differently
You do not need to scan the file this many times, you could create a db, like in mongo or mysql, and for each word you find, you fetch the db for it and then adds on some "counter" field.
You could ask me "but then I will have to scan my database a lot and it could take a lot more". Well, sure you wouldn't ask this, but it won't take more time because databases are focused in IO, besides you could always index it.
EDIT: There is no way to delimit at all?? Let's say that where you have the a Word.name string you really holds a (not simple) regex. Could the regex contain the \n? Well, if the regex can contain any value, you should estimate the maximum size of string the regex can fetch, double it, and scan the file by that ammount of chars but moving the cursor by that number.
Lets say your estimate of the maximum your regex could fetch it is like 20 chars nad your file has from 0 to 30000 chars. You pass each regex you have from 0 to 40 chars, then again from 20 to 60, from 40 to 80, etc...
You should also hold the position you found of your smaller regex so it wouldn't repeat it.
Finally, this solution seems to be not worth the effort, your problem may have a greater solution based on what that regexes are, but it will be faster than invoke scan Words.count times your your 300Mb string.
You could load your entire "Word" table into a Trie, then do back-tracking since you said there are no delimiters in the text.
So for each character in the text, go down the Trie of words. If you hit a word, increment its count. "Going down the trie" involves three cases:
There's no node at this character. (If you're mid-search, pop the back-tracking stack)
There's a node at this character. (But it's not a Word)
There's a node at this character. (It's a Word - increment and "dirty")
Back-tracking is just keeping track of places you want to go after you've exhausted this "search" of the Trie, which is when you run out of nodes to visit. This will probably be each character you visit that is a root of the Trie.
After you've done this, you can then visit all the nodes you changed and just update the records they represent.
This will take some time to implement, but will surely be faster than each & scan.
I am a Delphi programmer.
In a program I have to generate bidimensional arrays with different "branch" lengths.
They are very big and the operation takes a few seconds (annoying).
For example:
var a: array of array of Word;
i: Integer;
begin
SetLength(a, 5000000);
for i := 0 to 4999999 do
SetLength(a[i], Diff_Values);
end;
I am aware of the command SetLength(a, dim1, dim2) but is not applicable. Not even setting a min value (> 0) for dim2 and continuing from there because min of dim2 is 0 (some "branches" can be empty).
So, is there a way to make it fast? Not just by 5..10% but really FAST...
Thank you.
When dealing with a large amount of data, there's a lot of work that has to be done, and this places a theoretical minimum on the amount of time it can be done in.
For each of 5 million iterations, you need to:
Determine the size of the "branch" somehow
Allocate a new array of the appropriate size from the memory manager
Zero out all the memory used by the new array (SetLength does this for you automatically)
Step 1 is completely under your control and can possibly be optimized. 2 and 3, though, are about as fast as they're gonna get if you're using a modern version of Delphi. (If you're on an old version, you might benefit from installing FastMM and FastCode, which can speed up these operations.)
The other thing you might do, if appropriate, is lazy initialization. Instead of trying to allocate all 5 million arrays at once, just do the SetLength(a, 5000000); at first. Then when you need to get at a "branch", first check if its length = 0. If so, it hasn't been initialized, so initialize it to the proper length. This doesn't save time overall, in fact it will take slightly longer in total, but it does spread out the initialization time so the user doesn't notice.
If your initialization is already as fast as it will get, and your situation is such that lazy initialization can't be used here, then you're basically out of luck. That's the price of dealing with large amounts of data.
I just tested your exact code, with a constant for Diff_Values, timed it using GetTickCount() for rudimentary timing. If Diff_Values is 186 it takes 1466 milliseconds, if Diff_Values is 187 it fails with Out of Memory. You know, Out of Memory means Out of Address Space, not really Out of Memory.
In my opinion you're allocating so much data you run out of RAM and Windows starts paging, that's why it's slow. On my system I've got enough RAM for the process to allocate as much as it wants; And it does, until it fails.
Possible solutions
The obvious one: Don't allocate that much!
Figure out a way to allocate all data into one contiguous block of memory: helps with address space fragmentation. Similar to how a bi dimensional array with fixed size on the "branches" is allocated, but if your "branches" have different sizes, you'll need to figure a different mathematical formula, based on your data.
Look into other data structures, possibly ones that cache on disk (to brake the 2Gb address space limit).
In addition to Mason's points, here are some more ideas to consider:
If the branch lengths never change after they are allocated, and you have an upper bound on the total number of items that will be stored in the array across all branches, then you might be able to save some time by allocating one huge chunk of memory and divvying up the "branches" within that chunk yourself. Your array would become a 1 dimensional array of pointers, and each entry in that array points to the start of the data for that branch. You keep track of the "end" of the used space in your big block with a single pointer variable, and when you need to reserve space for a new "branch" you take the current "end" pointer value as the start of the new branch and increment the "end" pointer by the amount of space that branch requires. Don't forget to round up to dword boundaries to avoid misalignment penalties.
This technique will require more use of pointers, but it offers the potential of eliminating all the heap allocation overhead, or at least replacing the general purpose heap allocation with a purpose-built very simple, very fast suballocator that matches your specific use pattern. It should be faster to execute, but it will require more time to write and test.
This technique will also avoid heap fragmentation and reduces the releasing of all the memory to a single deallocation (instead of millions of separate allocations in your present model).
Another tip to consider: If the first thing you always do with the each newly allocated array "branch" is assign data into every slot, then you can eliminate step 3 in Mason's example - you don't need to zero out the memory if all you're going to do is immediately assign real data into it. This will cut your memory write operations by half.
Assuming you can fit the entire data structure into a contiguous block of memory, you can do the allocation in one shot and then take over the indexing.
Note: Even if you can't fit the data into a single contiguous block of memory, you can still use this technique by allocating multiple large blocks and then piecing them together.
First off form a helper array, colIndex, which is to contain the index of the first column of each row. Set the length of colIndex to RowCount+1. You build this by setting colIndex[0] := 0 and then colIndex[i+1] := colIndex[i] + ColCount[i]. Do this in a for loop which runs up to and including RowCount. So, in the final entry, colIndex[RowCount], you store the total number of elements.
Now set the length of a to be colIndex[RowCount]. This may take a little while, but it will be quicker than what you were doing before.
Now you need to write a couple of indexers. Put them in a class or a record.
The getter looks like this:
function GetItem(row, col: Integer): Word;
begin
Result := a[colIndex[row]+col];
end;
The setter is obvious. You can inline these access methods for increased performance. Expose them as an indexed property for convenience to the object's clients.
You'll want to add some code to check for validity of row and col. You need to use colIndex for the latter. You can make this checking optional with {$IFOPT R+} if you want to mimic range checking for native indexing.
Of course, this is a total non-starter if you want to change any of your column counts after the initial instantiation!
I need to store my data into memory. My type data of my data is string. I want to minimize the memory usage. I guess I have to change string into byte. Am I right? If I convert string to byte, that means I have to convert string to TMemoryStream?
If you really want to convert it then this code will get it done
var
BinarySize: Integer;
InputString: string;
StringAsBytes: array of Byte;
begin
BinarySize := (Length(InputString) + 1) * SizeOf(Char);
SetLength(StringAsBytes, BinarySize);
Move(InputString[1], StringAsBytes[0], BinarySize);
But as already stated this will not save you memory. The ammount of it used will be practically the same. You will gain nothing from this alone. If you are having to many strings take a different approach. Like something from this list of choices:
Use a dictionary and only store each same string once
Only hold a portion of all strings in memory. Some sort of cache. Have others on hard drive and use streams to load them
If you have very large string consider compressing them.
If you are reading from file and you target is binary data, skip the string in the middle. Read the source directly into a byte buffer.
It is hard to give further help without knowing more about the problem.
EDIT:
If you really want a minimum memory footprint and you can live with a little lower speed (but still very fast) you can use Suffix Trie or B-Tree or event a simple Binary Tree. They can work directly from hard drive and can be very fast for searching. If you then cache a subset of the data to RAM, you get the optimal solution memory vs. speed wise.
Anyway given the ammount of data you claim to have it seems no memory optimization is needed at all. 22MB of RAM is hardly an issue and not worth optimizing.
Are you certain this is an optimization that is needed?
2000 lines that are 10 characters long is only 20000 characters.
In most environments, that's tiny. Most machines have considerably more RAM than that. Most disks are considerably larger than that. And, usually, sending and receiving that much information is trivial over the web.
Perhaps your situation is unique. Maybe you have large number of 20000 character data sets, or very slow web access over which to transmit this date, etc. But, I'd encourage you to consider whether you aren't perhaps trying to optimize something that even if you are very successful in implementing, won't significantly change your application's performance in the real world.
Make your storage type tutf8string. It can be simply assigned from tunicodestring, and conversion should be safe.
I have a choice.
I have a number of already ordered strings that I need to store and access. It looks like I can choose between using:
A TStringList
A Dynamic Array of strings, and
A Linked List of strings (singly linked)
and Alan in his comment suggested I also add to the choices:
TList<string>
In what circumstances is each of these better than the others?
Which is best for small lists (under 10 items)?
Which is best for large lists (over 1000 items)?
Which is best for huge lists (over 1,000,000 items)?
Which is best to minimize memory use?
Which is best to minimize loading time to add extra items on the end?
Which is best to minimize access time for accessing the entire list from first to last?
On this basis (or any others), which data structure would be preferable?
For reference, I am using Delphi 2009.
Dimitry in a comment said:
Describe your task and data access pattern, then it will be possible to give you an exact answer
Okay. I've got a genealogy program with lots of data.
For each person I have a number of events and attributes. I am storing them as short text strings but there are many of them for each person, ranging from 0 to a few hundred. And I've got thousands of people. I don't need random access to them. I only need them associated as a number of strings in a known order attached to each person. This is my case of thousands of "small lists". They take time to load and use memory, and take time to access if I need them all (e.g. to export the entire generated report).
Then I have a few larger lists, e.g. all the names of the sections of my "virtual" treeview, which can have hundreds of thousands of names. Again I only need a list that I can access by index. These are stored separately from the treeview for efficiency, and the treeview retrieves them only as needed. This takes a while to load and is very expensive memory-wise for my program. But I don't have to worry about access time, because only a few are accessed at a time.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I'm trying to accomplish.
p.s. I've posted a lot of questions about optimizing Delphi here at StackOverflow. My program reads 25 MB files with 100,000 people and creates data structures and a report and treeview for them in 8 seconds but uses 175 MB of RAM to do so. I'm working to reduce that because I'm aiming to load files with several million people in 32-bit Windows.
I've just found some excellent suggestions for optimizing a TList at this StackOverflow question:
Is there a faster TList implementation?
Unless you have special needs, a TStringList is hard to beat because it provides the TStrings interface that many components can use directly. With TStringList.Sorted := True, binary search will be used which means that search will be very quick. You also get object mapping for free, each item can also be associated with a pointer, and you get all the existing methods for marshalling, stream interfaces, comma-text, delimited-text, and so on.
On the other hand, for special needs purposes, if you need to do many inserts and deletions, then something more approaching a linked list would be better. But then search becomes slower, and it is a rare collection of strings indeed that never needs searching. In such situations, some type of hash is often used where a hash is created out of, say, the first 2 bytes of a string (preallocate an array with length 65536, and the first 2 bytes of a string is converted directly into a hash index within that range), and then at that hash location, a linked list is stored with each item key consisting of the remaining bytes in the strings (to save space---the hash index already contains the first two bytes). Then, the initial hash lookup is O(1), and the subsequent insertions and deletions are linked-list-fast. This is a trade-off that can be manipulated, and the levers should be clear.
A TStringList. Pros: has extended functionality, allowing to dynamically grow, sort, save, load, search, etc. Cons: on large amount of access to the items by the index, Strings[Index] is introducing sensible performance lost (few percents), comparing to access to an array, memory overhead for each item cell.
A Dynamic Array of strings. Pros: combines ability to dynamically grow, as a TStrings, with the fastest access by the index, minimal memory usage from others. Cons: limited standard "string list" functionality.
A Linked List of strings (singly linked). Pros: the linear speed of addition of an item to the list end. Cons: slowest access by the index and searching, limited standard "string list" functionality, memory overhead for "next item" pointer, spead overhead for each item memory allocation.
TList< string >. As above.
TStringBuilder. I does not have a good idea, how to use TStringBuilder as a storage for multiple strings.
Actually, there are much more approaches:
linked list of dynamic arrays
hash tables
databases
binary trees
etc
The best approach will depend on the task.
Which is best for small lists (under
10 items)?
Anyone, may be even static array with total items count variable.
Which is best for large lists (over 1000 items)?
Which is best for huge lists (over 1,000,000 items)?
For large lists I will choose:
- dynamic array, if I need a lot of access by the index or search for specific item
- hash table, if I need to search by the key
- linked list of dynamic arrays, if I need many item appends and no access by the index
Which is best to minimize memory use?
dynamic array will eat less memory. But the question is not about overhead, but about on which number of items this overhead become sensible. And then how to properly handle this number of items.
Which is best to minimize loading time to add extra items on the end?
dynamic array may dynamically grow, but on really large number of items, memory manager may not found a continous memory area. While linked list will work until there is a memory for at least a cell, but for cost of memory allocation for each item. The mixed approach - linked list of dynamic arrays should work.
Which is best to minimize access time for accessing the entire list from first to last?
dynamic array.
On this basis (or any others), which data structure would be preferable?
For which task ?
If your stated goal is to improve your program to the point that it can load genealogy files with millions of persons in it, then deciding between the four data structures in your question isn't really going to get you there.
Do the math - you are currently loading a 25 MB file with about 100000 persons in it, which causes your application to consume 175 MB of memory. If you wish to load files with several millions of persons in it you can estimate that without drastic changes to your program you will need to multiply your memory needs by n * 10 as well. There's no way to do that in a 32 bit process while keeping everything in memory the way you currently do.
You basically have two options:
Not keeping everything in memory at once, instead using a database, or a file-based solution which you load data from when you need it. I remember you had other questions about this already, and probably decided against it, so I'll leave it at that.
Keep everything in memory, but in the most space-efficient way possible. As long as there is no 64 bit Delphi this should allow for a few million persons, depending on how much data there will be for each person. Recompiling this for 64 bit will do away with that limit as well.
If you go for the second option then you need to minimize memory consumption much more aggressively:
Use string interning. Every loaded data element in your program that contains the same data but is contained in different strings is basically wasted memory. I understand that your program is a viewer, not an editor, so you can probably get away with only ever adding strings to your pool of interned strings. Doing string interning with millions of string is still difficult, the "Optimizing Memory Consumption with String Pools" blog postings on the SmartInspect blog may give you some good ideas. These guys deal regularly with huge data files and had to make it work with the same constraints you are facing.
This should also connect this answer to your question - if you use string interning you would not need to keep lists of strings in your data structures, but lists of string pool indexes.
It may also be beneficial to use multiple string pools, like one for names, but a different one for locations like cities or countries. This should speed up insertion into the pools.
Use the string encoding that gives the smallest in-memory representation. Storing everything as a native Windows Unicode string will probably consume much more space than storing strings in UTF-8, unless you deal regularly with strings that contain mostly characters which need three or more bytes in the UTF-8 encoding.
Due to the necessary character set conversion your program will need more CPU cycles for displaying strings, but with that amount of data it's a worthy trade-off, as memory access will be the bottleneck, and smaller data size helps with decreasing memory access load.
One question: How do you query: do you match the strings or query on an ID or position in the list?
Best for small # strings:
Whatever makes your program easy to understand. Program readability is very important and you should only sacrifice it in real hotspots in your application for speed.
Best for memory (if that is the largest constrained) and load times:
Keep all strings in a single memory buffer (or memory mapped file) and only keep pointers to the strings (or offsets). Whenever you need a string you can clip-out a string using two pointers and return it as a Delphi string. This way you avoid the overhead of the string structure itself (refcount, length int, codepage int and the memory manager structures for each string allocation.
This only works fine if the strings are static and don't change.
TList, TList<>, array of string and the solution above have a "list" overhead of one pointer per string. A linked list has an overhead of at least 2 pointers (single linked list) or 3 pointers (double linked list). The linked list solution does not have fast random access but allows for O(1) resizes where trhe other options have O(lgN) (using a factor for resize) or O(N) using a fixed resize.
What I would do:
If < 1000 items and performance is not utmost important: use TStringList or a dyn array whatever is easiest for you.
else if static: use the trick above. This will give you O(lgN) query time, least used memory and very fast load times (just gulp it in or use a memory mapped file)
All mentioned structures in your question will fail when using large amounts of data 1M+ strings that needs to be dynamically chaned in code. At that Time I would use a balances binary tree or a hash table depending on the type of queries I need to maken.
From your description, I'm not entirely sure if it could fit in your design but one way you could improve on memory usage without suffering a huge performance penalty is by using a trie.
Advantages relative to binary search tree
The following are the main advantages
of tries over binary search trees
(BSTs):
Looking up keys is faster. Looking up a key of length m takes worst case
O(m) time. A BST performs O(log(n))
comparisons of keys, where n is the
number of elements in the tree,
because lookups depend on the depth of
the tree, which is logarithmic in the
number of keys if the tree is
balanced. Hence in the worst case, a
BST takes O(m log n) time. Moreover,
in the worst case log(n) will approach
m. Also, the simple operations tries
use during lookup, such as array
indexing using a character, are fast
on real machines.
Tries can require less space when they contain a large number of short
strings, because the keys are not
stored explicitly and nodes are shared
between keys with common initial
subsequences.
Tries facilitate longest-prefix matching, helping to find the key
sharing the longest possible prefix of
characters all unique.
Possible alternative:
I've recently discovered SynBigTable (http://blog.synopse.info/post/2010/03/16/Synopse-Big-Table) which has a TSynBigTableString class for storing large amounts of data using a string index.
Very simple, single layer bigtable implementation, and it mainly uses disc storage, to consumes a lot less memory than expected when storing hundreds of thousands of records.
As simple as:
aId := UTF8String(Format('%s.%s', [name, surname]));
bigtable.Add(data, aId)
and
bigtable.Get(aId, data)
One catch, indexes must be unique, and the cost of update is a bit high (first delete, then re-insert)
TStringList stores an array of pointer to (string, TObject) records.
TList stores an array of pointers.
TStringBuilder cannot store a collection of strings. It is similar to .NET's StringBuilder and should only be used to concatenate (many) strings.
Resizing dynamic arrays is slow, so do not even consider it as an option.
I would use Delphi's generic TList<string> in all your scenarios. It stores an array of strings (not string pointers). It should have faster access in all cases due to no (un)boxing.
You may be able to find or implement a slightly better linked-list solution if you only want sequential access. See Delphi Algorithms and Data Structures.
Delphi promotes its TList and TList<>. The internal array implementation is highly optimized and I have never experienced performance/memory issues when using it. See Efficiency of TList and TStringList