Binary Tree Serialization Techniques

Chris Mevissen gave a report on the research he has been doing on serializable binary trees.

Although Perl's hash is any many ways faster than a binary tree, it does require more memory. At the end of the April meeting, we were discussing ways to reduce the memory footprint of a relatively large hash. We also discussed ways to only load a subset of the data into memory.

Chris decided to take some of the ideas we had discussed and explore them on his own. This presentation covers his findings, so far. He began by describing the basics of binary tree data structures and descibes a basic implementation in Perl. He works his way through showing how a binary tree can be serialized in a form that can be easily reloaded.

Chris walked us through his implementation and what he learned in tweaking the design and testing serializing and deserializing various binary trees.

The code from his project is available on github.

We had 9 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.