On: Demystifying Radix Trees: How Radix trees made blocking IPs 5000 times faster

[dgritsko]

Wouldn't the benefit of path compression mean reducing the memory footprint of the data structure?

And regarding fixed-length: "This lets us optimize the lookup code." More detail here would be cool but it wasn't really the point of the article.

[daveFNbuck → dgritsko]

My guess is that the path compression speeds up lookups by increasing data locality and reducing the number of fetches needed. Memory footprint probably isn't a big concern for storing 10,000 entries.