Worse case time complexity put/get HashMap

Question

What is the worst case time complexity of an Hashmap when the hashcode of it\'s keys are always equal.

In my understanding: As every key has the same hashcode it will al

Answer 1

Yes, in the worst case your hash map will degenerate into a linked list and you will suffer an O(N) penalty for lookups, as well as inserts and deletions, both of which require a lookup operation (thanks to the comments for pointing out the mistake in my earlier answer).

There are some ways of mitigating the worst-case behavior, such as by using a self-balancing tree instead of a linked list for the bucket overflow - this reduces the worst-case behavior to O(logn) instead of O(n).