Hierarchical Tables (cont.)
This mechanism can greatly reduce storage requirements in STF files, simplify the creation of OpenGL primitives, and discover topological information.
The API provides a mechanism for directly attaching the indexed components, so that you don’t have to find the Hierarchical Table and components yourself.
However, there is a performance penalty when accessing Hierarchical Tables with large number of components.
Because the indices can be pointing to any entry in the Table, the access to the Table is effectively randomized. The implementation of the API was designed for fast sequential and associative access, and so performance is less than stellar in these cases.