Thread: Performance Q: Iterate or aggregate pointers?

Hello.
Say I have a thousand instances of a structure, and some of these may be linked to each other due to some criteria that is used on action A.
Upon running action A for one of these structs, would it be better performance-wise to iterate through the thousand looking for (if any) are linked OR to possess a array in each struct that'd hold the pointers to its linked entities (if any), in a manner iterating through the thousand would not be necessary as it'd iterate through that array and then push the linked entities to perform the action.
Question is: Which is better? Iterating or aggregating the pointers to the linked entities?
Thank you for your time.

Do you have more ram or processor time? If memory isn't an issue, then you can trade off some memory for saving some CPU time. If you need to conserve memory, and have CPU cycles to spare, that's the way to go.


Quzah.

I would suggest you profile it, to find out where the issue(s) really are.

That is, before committing several days/weeks to another round of design + code + debugging + testing to implement your "idea", only to find that it doesn't noticeably make anything better.