A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

You’ll see that O( N) makes a perfect diagonal line. This is because for every additional piece of data, the algorithm takes one additional step. Accordingly, the more data, the more steps the algorithm will take. For the record, O( N) is also known as linear time. Contrast this with O( 1), which is a perfect horizontal line, since the number of steps in the algorithm remains constant no matter how much data there is. Because of this, O( 1) is also referred to as constant time.