Which is the fastest STL container for find?

Question

Alright as a preface I have a need to cache a relatively small subset of rarely modified data to avoid querying the database as frequently for performance reasons. This data

Answer 1

Since from your (extended) requirements you need to search on multiple fields, I would point you to Boost.MultiIndex.

This Boost library lets you build one container (with only one exemplary of each element it contains) and index it over an arbitrary number of indices. It also lets you precise which indices to use.

To determine the kind of index to use, you'll need extensive benchmarks. 500 is a relatively low number of entries, so constant factors won't play nicely. Furthermore, there can be a noticeable difference between single-thread and multi-thread usage (most hash-table implementations can collapse on MT usage because they do not use linear-rehashing, and thus a single thread ends up rehashing the table, blocking all others).

I would recommend a sorted index (skip-list like, if possible) to accomodate range requests (all names beginning by Abc ?) if the performance difference is either unnoticeable or simply does not matter.