The C++ Standard Template Library (STL) can be pretty intimidating. I used to think that there’s a lot of magic under the covers to make things go really fast. It turns out that while using the STL is convinient for prototype, its not really built for performance.

A few days back, we needed to do some //compare-by-hash// operations on two files. In all we were doing around 32 million hash table lookups (plus of course the overhead of computing the hash values themselves). On a reasonably fast machine, one would expect that 32 million operations shouldn’t take very long. However, this particular program ran for one **whole day**.

Then Amin suggested that we rip out the STL stuff and just work with a statically allocated hash table since we weren’t really concerned about memory management at this stage. And guess what, the runtime fell to around **10 minutes**. Thats //two orders of magnitude// performance improvement!! I had never imagined that the STL could be //soo// slow.