Editing Splay tree (section)

== Disadvantages ==

The most significant disadvantage of splay trees is that the height of a splay tree can be linear.<ref name="BrinkmannDegraerDeLoof" />{{rp|1}}  For example, this will be the case after accessing all ''n'' elements in non-decreasing order.  Since the height of a tree corresponds to the worst-case access time, this means that the actual cost of a single operation can be high. However the [[amortized]] access cost of this worst case is logarithmic, O(log ''n'').  Also, the expected access cost can be reduced to O(log ''n'') by using a randomized variant.<ref>{{harvnb|Albers|Karpinski|2002}}.</ref>

The representation of splay trees can change even when they are accessed in a 'read-only' manner (i.e. by ''find'' operations).  This complicates the use of such splay trees in a multi-threaded environment.  Specifically, extra management is needed if multiple threads are allowed to perform ''find'' operations concurrently. This also makes them unsuitable for general use in purely functional programming, although even there they can be used in limited ways to implement priority queues.

Finally, when the access pattern ''is'' random, the additional splaying overhead adds a significant constant factor to the cost compared to less-dynamic alternatives.