separate chaining the efficiency analysis for separate chaining is differentand generally easierthan for open addressing we want to know how long it takes to search for or insert an item into separate-chaining hash table we'll assume that the most time-consuming part of these operations is comparing the search key of the item with the keys of other items in the list we'll also assume that the time required to hash to the appropriate listand to determine when the end of list has been reachedis equivalent to one key comparison thus all operations require +ncomps timewhere ncomps is the number of key comparisons let' say that the hash table consists of arraysize elementseach of which holds listand that data items have been inserted in the table thenon the averageeach list will hold divided by arraysize itemsaverage list length arraysize this is the same as the definition of the load factorloadfactor arraysize so the average list length equals the load factor searching in successful searchthe algorithm hashes to the appropriate list and then searches along the list for the item on the averagehalf the items must be examined before the correct one is located thus the search time is loadfactor this is true whether the lists are ordered or not in an unsuccessful searchif the lists are unorderedall the items must be searchedso the time is loadfactor