This is a pretty nice speed win.
The new strategy consists in stacking new candidates as if it was a hash chain.
Then, only if there is a need to actually consult the chain, they are batch-updated,
before starting the match search itself.
This is supposed to be beneficial when skipping positions,
which happens a lot when using lazy strategy.
The baseline performance for btlazy2 on my laptop is :
15#calgary.tar : 3265536 -> 955985 (3.416), 7.06 MB/s , 618.0 MB/s
15#enwik7 : 10000000 -> 3067341 (3.260), 4.65 MB/s , 521.2 MB/s
15#silesia.tar : 211984896 -> 58095131 (3.649), 6.20 MB/s , 682.4 MB/s
(only level 15 remains for btlazy2, as this strategy is squeezed between lazy2 and btopt)
After this patch, and keeping all parameters identical,
speed is increased by a pretty good margin (+30-50%),
but compression ratio suffers a bit :
15#calgary.tar : 3265536 -> 958060 (3.408), 9.12 MB/s , 621.1 MB/s
15#enwik7 : 10000000 -> 3078318 (3.249), 6.37 MB/s , 525.1 MB/s
15#silesia.tar : 211984896 -> 58444111 (3.627), 9.89 MB/s , 680.4 MB/s
That's because I kept `1<<searchLog` as a maximum number of candidates to update.
But for a hash chain, this represents the total number of candidates in the chain,
while for the binary, it represents the maximum depth of searches.
Keep in mind that a lot of candidates won't even be visited in the btree,
since they are filtered out by the binary sort.
As a consequence, in the new implementation,
the effective depth of the binary tree is substantially shorter.
To compensate, it's enough to increase `searchLog` value.
Here is the result after adding just +1 to searchLog (level 15 setting in this patch):
15#calgary.tar : 3265536 -> 956311 (3.415), 8.32 MB/s , 611.4 MB/s
15#enwik7 : 10000000 -> 3067655 (3.260), 5.43 MB/s , 535.5 MB/s
15#silesia.tar : 211984896 -> 58113144 (3.648), 8.35 MB/s , 679.3 MB/s
aka, almost the same compression ratio as before,
but with a noticeable speed increase (+20-30%).
This modification makes btlazy2 more competitive.
A new round of paramgrill will be necessary to determine which levels are impacted and could adopt the new strategy.
Nick Terrell
Yann Collet
Stella Lau