astar_search does unnecessary initialization of vertices

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#356 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
performance

Research direction

Start by locating the astar_search implementation in the Boost Graph code and trace how vertex state is initialized before and when vertices enter the open set. Compare the current initialization cost with the lazy-initialization behavior described in the issue, then verify that A* behavior remains correct while large vertex containers avoid unnecessary construction.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

performance

From Keith Bennet:

astar_search() takes too much time to initialize all vertices (in a 2048x2048x40 matrix) even though we only need to initialize vertices when they are added to the open set. We ensure our data's initialization state is identical to a default-constructed object, then guarantee that the vertex initialization is done when the vertex is first added to the open set, and of course A* ensures that vertices aren't used until they're added to the open set (eg, when they're first discovered). To make resizing containers quicker, we ensure that our default-constructed objects are trivially-constructible so that resizing the underlying containers to match the matrix size does not require invoking expensive constructors which effectively reduces the initialization requirements to just resizing the containers correctly and setting the non-zero start-point state and end-point state.

Dominant language
C++
Stars
395
Forks
239
Avg merge
18h 50m
Merged PRs (30d)
20

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