Replaced server member lists, channel lists, and private channel lists
with dicts. This allows O(1) lookups and removes (previously it would be
an O(N) operation to lookup or remove). I did pretty extensive testing
and benchmarking to compare the performance of using lists vs using
dicts. Iterating through lists to find an item is only faster in the
average case for extremely small lists (less than 3 items). For 100
items, using a dict is about 10 times faster on average (and about 100
times faster for 1000 items). The overhead in dicts is in memory usage
and initial creation time. Creating and populating a dict is about 2 to
3 times slower than creating and appending items to a list. However this
cost is still tiny. For 1000 items this equates to about a 70
microsecond difference (on an i7 CPU) for populating the entire dict.
The memory overhead for a dict (compared to a list) is about 25-60 KB
per 1000 items (can vary depending on dict resizing).
Originally I wanted to use OrderedDicts to presereve order, but in my
testing OrderedDicts have about 6x the memory overhead compared to
normal dicts.
Adds comments and also rewrites the logic in a way that is much easier
to see what is going on. For example you can now easily see that the
port is actually encoded in little endian (which is different from
everything else).
It probably isn't good to rely on an item that was added to a list to
still be the last item, especially if we could have other async
coroutines modify the list. This may not be an actual issue, but having
the function explicitly return the object that it just added to the list
should guarantee that we don't accidentally pull the wrong item from the
end of the list later.
Steven BerlerandRapptz