Could you please provide me with some well-known examples of the space-time tradeoff?
During a past interview, someone asked me this question.
Unfortunately, at that time, I was unable to provide any strong examples.
Now after a few years, I’m attempting to come up with a better solution.
trading space for time
By utilizing additional space, we can reduce the time required to complete a task.
Here are some common scenarios:
- Cache: Cache involves storing computationally expensive data or highly frequently accessed data in memory for faster access in the future.
- Indexing: Indexing is a term used in databases, and it is a special data structure that could contain one or more columns and is designed for quick searching.
Indexing consumes more space in disk and memory to store ordered data to provide a time deduction while searching. - CDN: Content Delivery Network is an infrastructure of the internet that stores multiple copies of data in different locations around the world to improve the speed of data transfer.
Users can access the copy nearest to them based on their geographical location, which reduces the time it takes to transfer data over the internet.
While it may be controversial whether CDNs strictly fit the definition of trading space for time, they do use additional storage space to speed up access times.
trading time for space
Trading time for space is less common than the reverse trading since computing resources are usually more expensive than storage.
However, there are also some well-known examples of how this tradeoff applies:
- Data Compression: Data compression involves compacting data into a smaller size, which is widely used for transporting multimedia data since it often contains a lot of redundancy.
Data compression can be classified as either lossless compression or lossy compression, depending on whether information is lost during compression. - GC: Garbage Collection involves finding and freeing up useless memory. Like CNDs, it may not fit the definition well, but it does consume more CPU to release memory.
