Time vs. Space Complexity in Software Development


Time versus space complexity

When creating software for serious applications, there is usually a need to judge how quickly an algorithm or program can complete the given tasks. For example, if you are programming a flight booking system, it will not be considered acceptable if the travel agent and customer have to wait for half an hour for a transaction to complete. It certainly has to be ensured that the waiting time is reasonable for the size of the problem, and normally faster execution is better. We talk about the time complexity of the algorithm as an indicator of how the execution time depends on the size of the data structure.

Another important efficiency consideration is how much memory a given program will require for a particular task, though with modern computers this tends to be less of an issue than it used to be. Here we talk about the space complexity as how the memory requirement depends on the size of the data structure.

For a given task, there are often algorithms which trade time for space, and vice versa. For example, we will see that, as a data storage device, hash tables have a very good time complexity at the expense of using more memory than is needed by other algorithms. It is usually up to the algorithm/program designer to decide how best to balance the trade-off for the application they are designing.

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