Tuesday, November 27, 2012

LRU Cache Implementation - O(1)

LRU Cache is a well known data structure used in many of the applications like ehCache (used by Hibernate), Web Caching (to cache most frequently used pages), Disk-Cleanup utilities etc. The main concept here is - you need to build a cache which holds key/value pairs.The cache would have a predefined size, if the no of key/value pairs exceeds the size then flush out least recently used items.

For instance if I added items a, b, c, d, e in the same order and the size limit is 5. Then if i want to add f, then  i have to flush out a (since that is the one last created). So I would have b, c, d, e, f. Now if i access c (either update or get), then that becomes the most recent item, so the order would be b, d, e, f, c. We should support remove operation as well.

Java provides LinkedHashMap class, which can be used to implement a LRU Cache. However, the time-complexity would not be O(1). As it doesn't ensure collision-free hashing and the linked list traversal is sequential. So we will redesign this Cache. I have not added Multi-Threading capability to my implementation and it is not templatized.

In my earlier post I had discussed how to build a Perfect HashMap (with no collisions). So today we will use that HashMap and we will slightly modify the structure to achieve LRU. The HashMap would store key/value pair, for now I am using key as Integer and value as String. Lets call this key/value class as "Pair". The HashMap is nothing but an array of "Pair"s. But as per our requirement whenever the key is accessed (update/get) we need to make it as the most recent. So what we need is a Linked List to store the keys and whenever the key is accessed bring it to the front. However if I have to do that, then I need to go through all the keys to find the specific key. So I modified the Pair class to below


class Pair {
Integer key;
Node val;
}


class Node {
String val;
Node left;
Node right;
}

So I can store the value in the node and the same node can be used as a linkedlist node.

So whenever a new key/value is added the value node is added to the head. And when the cache is full, the key and the value node at tail are removed. Whenever a key is accessed, the corresponding node is brought to the head.

Solution


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