title: New to AVL tree implementation
body: <p>I am writing a sliding window compression algorithm (LZ77) that searches for phrases in a "moving" dictionary.</p>
  
  <p>So far I have written a BST where each node is stored in an array and it's index in the array is also the value of the starting position in the window itself.</p>
  
  <p>I am now looking at transforming the BST to an AVL tree. I am a little confused at the sample implementations I have seen. Some only appear to store the balance factors whereas others store the height of each tree.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any performance advantage/disadvantages of storing the height and/or balance factor for each node? Apologies if this is a very simple question, but I'm still not visualizing how I want to restructure my BST to implement height balancing.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>