However, these flag values will contribute to the load factor of the hash table and it may be necessary to clean them out of the array and rehash all the remaining key--value pairs if too large a fraction of the array is occupied by deleted keys.
However, these flag values will contribute to the load factor of the hash table. With this strategy, it may become necessary to clean the flag values out of the array and rehash all the remaining key--value pairs once too large a fraction of the array becomes occupied by deleted keys.