Hello,

This patch:

- adds a comparison of bcache and hashtab.[hc]
Summary: bcache has significantly less memory overhead

- tweaks the bcache algorithm to eliminate the one performance -ve
Summary: all memcmp's eliminated

- exploits an assumption that nothing is bigger than 64k
Summary: I figure stuff bigger than 64k shouldn't be in memory :-)

As for the tweak making a measurable difference, for "file gdb" it is 
slight (approx 0.780s vs 0.773s) but still there.

Daniel, does this answer your hashtab VS bcache question? :-)

Comments?  Baring them, I'll commit in a few days.

Andrew

PS: The stats.

   Cached 'partial symbol cache' statistics:
     Total object count:  36924
     Unique object count: 15935
     Percentage of duplicates, by count:  56%

     Total object size:   886176
     Unique object size:  382440
     Percentage of duplicates, by size:   56%

     Max entry size:     24
     Average entry size: 24
     Median entry size:  24

     Total memory used by bcache, including overhead: 526316
     Percentage memory overhead:  37%
     Net memory savings:          40%

     Hash table size:           4099
     Hash table expands:        3
     Hash table hashes:         52294
     Half hash misses:          0
     Hash table population:      97%
     Median hash chain length:    4
     Average hash chain length:   3
     Maximum hash chain length:  12

Notice how the half hash miss is zero.  This indicates that, on real 
data, all unnecessary memcmp's were eliminated!

Also notice how everything is 24 bytes in size (psymbol) because GDB 
isn't written in C++ :-(

.