The new API takes directly the object doing everything needed to
turn it into a dense representation, including setting the new
representation as object->ptr.
Code never tested, but the basic layout is shaped in this commit.
Also missing:
1) Sparse -> Dense conversion function.
2) New HLL object creation using the sparse representation.
3) Implementation of PFMERGE for the sparse representation.
Metadata are now placed at the start of the representation as an header.
There is a proper structure to access the representation.
Still work to do in order to truly abstract the implementation from the
representation, commands still work assuming dense representation.
After running a few simulations with different alternative encodings,
it was found that the VAL opcode performs better using 5 bits for the
value and 2 bits for the run length, at least for cardinalities in the
range of interest.
This will be a non-op most of the times since the object will be
unshared / decoded, however it is more technically correct to start this
way since the object may be decoded even in the read-only code path.
Using a seed of zero has the side effect of having the empty string
hashing to what is a very special case in the context of HyperLogLog: a
very long run of zeroes.
This did not influenced the correctness of the result with 16k registers
because of the harmonic mean, but still it is inconvenient that a so
obvious value maps to a so special hash.
The seed 0xadc83b19 is used instead, which is the first 64 bits of the
SHA1 of the empty string.
Reference: issue #1657.
We need to guarantee that the last bit is 1, otherwise an element may
hash to just zeroes with probability 1/(2^64) and trigger an infinite
loop.
See issue #1657.
This will allow future changes like compressed representations.
Currently the magic is not checked for performance reasons but this may
change in the future, for example if we add new types encoded in strings
that may have the same size of HyperLogLogs.
Better results can be achieved by compensating for the bias of the raw
approximation just after 2.5m (when LINEARCOUNTING is no longer used) by
using a polynomial that approximates the bias at a given cardinality.
The curve used was found using this web page:
http://www.xuru.org/rt/PR.asp
That performs polynomial regression given a set of values.
The following form is given:
HLLADD myhll
No element is provided in the above case so if 'myhll' var does not
exist the result is to just create an empty HLL structure, and no update
will be performed on the registers.
In this case, the DB should still be set dirty and the command
propagated.
The HyperLogLog original paper suggests using LINEARCOUNTING for
cardinalities < 2.5m, however for P=14 the median / max error
curves show that a value of '3' is the best pick for m = 16384.
The more we add elements to an HyperLogLog counter, the smaller is
the probability that we actually update some register.
From this observation it is easy to see how it is possible to use
caching of a previously computed cardinality and reuse it to serve
HLLCOUNT queries as long as no register was updated in the data
structure.
This commit does exactly this by using just additional 8 bytes for the
data structure to store a 64 bit unsigned integer value cached
cardinality. When the most significant bit of the 64 bit integer is set,
it means that the value computed is no longer usable since at least a
single register was modified and we need to recompute it at the next
call of HLLCOUNT.
The value is always stored in little endian format regardless of the
actual CPU endianess.
All the Redis functions that need to modify the string value of a key in
a destructive way (APPEND, SETBIT, SETRANGE, ...) require to make the
object unshared (if refcount > 1) and encoded in raw format (if encoding
is not already REDIS_ENCODING_RAW).
This was cut & pasted many times in multiple places of the code. This
commit puts the small logic needed into a function called
dbUnshareStringValue().
We need to be sure that you can save a dataset in a Redis instance,
reload it in a different architecture, and continue to count in the same
HyperLogLog structure.
So 32 and 64 bit, little or bit endian, must all guarantee to output the
same hash for the same element.
The new representation is more obvious, starting from the LSB of the
first byte and using bits going to MSB, and passing to next byte as
needed.
There was also a subtle error: first two bits were unused, everything
was carried over on the right of two bits, even if it worked because of
the code requirement of always having a byte more at the end.
During the rewrite the code was made safer trying to avoid undefined
behavior due to shifting an uint8_t for more than 8 bits.
To test the bitfield array of counters set/get macros from the Redis Tcl
suite is hard, so a specialized command that is able to test the
internals was developed.
