I guess i am confused again then, that is not at all the impression i got from Kelder's explanation. My understanding has always been that the reason hashtables are so much faster is because they literally dont need to go through and check every item.
Going by what Kelder said, i assumed that it would somehow determine a hash key or keys in order to know which slots to look in. So you could conclude that the size of the table itself does not affect the speed, where as infact it is the ratio of the slots/items that determines this. (since it takes very little time to check through the 10ish items stored in each slot).
More specifically comments such as, however it is quite possible that i misunderstood.
"Basically this always takes the same amount of time, irrespective of the number of items involved..."
"The time taken to do this depends of the number of items in that list. Generally, going over 10 or 20 items doesn't take much time, so that why you can put 10 times as many items in a hash table as the size." - by 'list' here i got the impression he meant array list aka array slot aka slot.
