Introduction
Laymen explanation
Technical explanation
Boost.MultiIndex helps the programmer to avoid the manual construction of cumbersome compositions of containers when multiindexing capabilities are needed. Furthermore, it does so in an efficient manner, both in terms of space and time consumption. The space savings stem from the compact representation of the underlying data structures, requiring a single node per element. As for time efficiency, Boost.MultiIndex intensively uses metaprogramming techniques producing very tight implementations of member functions which take care of the elementary operations for each index: for multi_index_containers with two or more indices, the running time can be reduced to half as long as with manual simulations involving several STL containers.
Reference
https://cs.brown.edu/~jwicks/boost/libs/multi_index/doc/performance.html