What is separate chaining? — In hash table conflict resolution, each bucket is independent and has some sort of linked list of entries with the same index. The time for hash table operations is the time to find the bucket (which is constant) plus the time for the list operation. In a good hash table, each bucket has zero or one entries, and sometimes two or three, but rarely more than that. Therefore, structures that are efficient in time and space for these cases are preferred. Structures that are efficient for a fairly large number of entries per bucket are not needed or desirable. If these cases happen often, the hashing function needs to be fixed.