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A comment on What are Bloom filters? (2015). Parent comment

Re:What are Bloom filters? (2015) by nitrogen on Friday August 05, 2016 @02:25PM (#12234676)
At Reddit's size, wouldn't that just shift the problem from looking up votes to looking up lists? Millions of users times millions of articles? Seems like a fast way to get an early "no" would still be useful.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What are Bloom filters? (2015) by Retric on Friday August 05, 2016 @03:03PM (#12234969)
Your looking it up once per page vs. once per comment. So, yes it might be faster, but when something takes 1% of total time speeding it up has massive diminishing returns.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What are Bloom filters? (2015) by nitrogen on Friday August 05, 2016 @05:12PM (#12235782)
Still, 1% of a very large number (I don't know Reddit's server costs) can be a large enough number to be worth pursuing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What are Bloom filters? (2015) by Retric on Saturday August 06, 2016 @07:00AM (#12237713)
Agreed, HN uses 1 server and /. had 4 so I assume Reddit is of a similar size, but if they need a bunch of HW then sure it might be useful.
[ Parent | on HN ]