performance work

[Michael Stone]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 09:20:27AM -0700, Jordan Crouse wrote:
>The solution to the performance problems is good old fashioned elbow 
>grease.... These are the sorts of things that we need to find and
>squash - and yes, it will be very time consuming and a little boring.

Several anecdotes for your amusement and reflection:

* When was the last time someone posted to devel asking: "what is the
   right algorithm or datastructure for task ____?"

* When was the last time someone publicly analyzed the upper or lower
   bounds on the bandwidth, latency, or quantity of messages necessary to
   accomplish task ____?

* When was the last time that you published a performance goal for your
   software? Did you hit it? Did anyone notice?

Michael

P.S. - Charles Leiserson once remarked that performance is like a
currency which programmers trade for (all) other worthwhile things like
schedule targets, scope of features, other resource consumption, various
kinds of security, etc [1]. This suggests that one would do better to
ask for performance or ____ but not both. Think of Blizzard.

[1] http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-one/