Building a Fast, Memory-Efficient Hash Table in Java: A SwissTable-Inspired Design

Building a Fast, Memory-Efficient Hash Table in Java: A Deep Dive into SwissTable-Inspired Design Have you ever wondered why some hash tables remain lightning-fast even under high load, while others slow to a crawl as they fill up? One day, I stumbled upon SwissTable—a design that made me squint, grin, and immediately regret every naive linear-probing hash table I’d ever written. This post is the story of how I tried to bring that “why is this so fast?” feeling into the Java world. It’s part technical deep dive, part engineering diary, and part cautionary tale about performance optimization work. I’ll …