Dictionary<> Performance

Question

Im using a Dictionary, i will have around a million entries and i will be regularly be adding, removing, editing, and polling.. im wondering what the up/down sides of all the entries will be, and if there is a more efficiant way.

Answer 1

It depends what you want to do. If you want a key-value pair store with fast insertion, lookup and removal, you can't get much better.

But if you want to get the smallest key, a dictionary won't help you much as you will have to search the entire dictionary. A SortedDictionary might be better in this case.

The most suitable data structure depends on what data you will store, and how will be using it. Since you haven't told us either, it's very hard to give a concrete answer to your question.

Answer 2

Would help a little bit if you could elaborate more the question. For example: Advantages and Disadvantages of Dictionaty over what other data-structure ? Linked lists ? B-Trees ?
As far as I can see, the biggest advantage of a dictionary data structure is the O(1) magnitude for searching a single item.

Answer 3

At the risk of repeating other people's comments, without more information about the specifics, it's hard to know what's good for your purposes.

But I will stress that if what you need is a fast add, remove, and lookup by key, DO NOT write your own dictionary-like data structure. Dictionary<> is incredibly well optimized and robust. You are very unlikely to improve on it without spending WAY more than your available resources.