One Hash Bloom Filters

144 points by jcalabro a day ago on hackernews | 14 comments

gwittel | 22 hours ago

I hadn’t seen that one hash paper before. This is a really cool optimization over Miztenmacher. Do you have benchmark numbers with different input sizes you can share?

I’ll have to read the paper and code more, but it seems like this would be amenable to supporting filter merges as well (as long as the new size doesn’t exceed the filters’ capacity).

FreakLegion | 22 hours ago

NB: You're trading non-negligible space efficiency here, which gets worse as you lower the false positive rate. Partitioning means uneven occupancy rates across partitions, and either you accept low occupancy (increased filter size overall) or you're pretty much guaranteed to have hot blocks (increased false positive rate for specific partitions).

senderista | 19 hours ago

You are describing "blocked" bloom filters here (i.e., the k hash functions are evaluated in a single block which is initially chosen by the hash). "Partitioned" bloom filters (i.e., each hash function is evaluated in a separate partition) don't have the imbalance problem you describe.

FreakLegion | 18 hours ago

I'm describing the data structure from the article, which is partitioned twice: first into 64-byte, then into pairwise coprime-sized chunks. The 64-byte chunks are what you're quoting as "blocked", the pairwise coprime-sized chunks as "partitioned". The space inefficiency I mentioned applies to the 64-byte chunks.

aidenn0 | 15 hours ago

Given that they are partitioning into cache-line sized blocks, I assume they are partitioning as a time-space tradeoff?

[edit]

Rereading that section more carefully, they are concerned about concurrent write performance to the bloom filter; since two CPUs can not write to the same cache-line in parallel, it's definitely done for performance reasons.

FreakLegion | 11 hours ago

It's absolutely a speed optimization, although more for reads than writes. The 64-byte cache line bit is a standard blocked Bloom filter. Add SIMD queries and that's about as fast as these things get.

The other side of the tradeoff is bumped ribbon retrieval. Blocked Bloom filters are about 50% bigger than BuRR.

hei-lima | 21 hours ago

Great post!

aappleby | 21 hours ago

You don't actually have to do this - you can stick with a power of 2 sized table and just gently mix the hash value to get each additional bit index.

(source - I wrote MurmurHash/SMHasher and have used the above in my own bloom filters and cuckoo hash tables)

senderista | 19 hours ago

Something like this? 64-bit hash, 9 bits to address all the bits in a 64-byte cache line, so 7 hash functions addressing the bits in a cache line can be extracted from a 64-bit hash?

adgjlsfhk1 | 19 hours ago

yeah. You also don't need complete independence. You can use partially overlapping bits to get semi-independent hashes.

AlotOfReading | 18 hours ago

The one hashing scheme should be technically better.

That said, I suspect you could avoid the coprime partitions and the issues they cause with semi-correlated permutations over block partitions and avoid hash collisions in the process.

cperciva | 19 hours ago

While much cheaper than going to disk, computing k independent hashes per key is still a bit expensive for very high performance systems.

Depends how big the bloom filter is. Most hashes are big and their bits are independent.

rickcarlino | 9 hours ago

Gnutella and Gnutella2 used something like a single hash bloom filter to route p2p file queries across the mesh in a less wasteful manner. It was not perfect, but it worked enough to scale to very large user counts.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/p2p/how-gnutella-scaled-to-han...

ozgrakkurt | 5 hours ago

Did anyone benchmark this against blocked bloom filters or binary fuse filters?