OBHTs: choosing the no. of buckets
Recall: The load factor of a hash table is the average number of entries per bucket, n/m.
If n is (roughly) predictable, choose m such that the load factor is likely to be between 0.5 and 0.75.
- A low load factor wastes space.
- A high load factor tends to result in long clusters.
Choose m to be a prime number.