I ran this on an Amazon EC2 m2.4xlarge instance with the Red Hat 6.1 x86_64 AMI (ami-31d41658).

$ yum install make-3.81-19.el6.x86_64            \
            gcc-4.4.5-6.el6.x86_64               \
            gcc-c++-4.4.5-6.el6.x86_64           \
            python-devel-2.6.6-20.el6.x86_64     \
            glib2-devel-2.22.5-6.el6.x86_64      \
            boost-devel-1.41.0-11.el6_1.2.x86_64 \
            qt-devel-4.6.2-17.el6_1.1.x86_64     \
            git

$ wget http://google-sparsehash.googlecode.com/files/sparsehash-1.11-1.noarch.rpm
$ rpm -i sparsehash-1.11-1.noarch.rpm
$ git clone git://github.com/timonk/hash-table-shootout.git

Nick's original benchmark with higher key count and restricted to just random integer inserts:

$ cd hash-table-shootout
$ mkdir build
$ make
$ python bench.py
$ python make_chart_data.py < output | python make_html.py

Your charts are now in charts.html.

You can tweak some of the values in bench.py to make it run faster at the expense of less granular data, and you might need to tweak some of the tickSize settings in charts-template.html.

To run the benchmark at the highest priority possible, do this:

$ sudo nice -n-20 ionice -c1 -n0 sudo -u $USER python bench.py

since I'm running this as root on EC2, it's simply:

$ nice -n-20 ionice -c1 -n0 python bench.py

You might also want to disable any swap files/partitions so that swapping doesn't influence performance. (The programs will just die if they try to allocate too much memory.)

To run the throughput benchmark:

$ cd hash-table-shootout
$ mkdir build_throughput
$ make -f MakefileThroughput
$ python bench_throughput.py

The results can be found in output_throughput. I just hacked up my own charts, but I might add a similar utility to generate charts like Nick's.

You can use the same nice/ionice command line as above to run it at highest priority, but replace bench.py with bench_throughput.py, naturally.

Modified by Timon Karnezos in 2011.

Originally written by Nick Welch in 2010.

No copyright. This work is dedicated to the public domain.

For full details, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/