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Why would you use a skip list over a binary search tree?

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Guys can someone help me by describing the skip-list and why someone should use it over BST.

posted Nov 11, 2013 by Majula Joshi

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1 Answer

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Skip lists are more amenable to concurrent access/modification.

The most frequently used implementation of a binary search tree is a red-black tree. The concurrent problems come in when the tree is modified it often needs to rebalance. The rebalance operation can affect large portions of the tree, which would require a mutex lock on many of the tree nodes. Inserting a node into a skip list is far more localized, only nodes directly linked to the affected node need to be locked.

answer Nov 12, 2013 by Atul Mishra
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