The biggest tool in the performance toolbox is stubbornness. Without it all the mechanical sympathy in the world will go unexploited.
There’s about a factor of 3 improvement that can be made to most code after the profiler has given up. That probably means there are better profilers than could be written, but in 20 years of having them I’ve only seen 2 that tried. Sadly I think flame graphs made profiling more accessible to the unmotivated but didn’t actually improve overall results.
I think the biggest tool is higher expectations. Most programmers really haven't come to grips with the idea that computers are fast.
If you see a database query that takes 1 hour to run, and only touches a few gb of data, you should be thinking "Well nvme bandwidth is multiple gigabytes per second, why can't it run in 1 second or less?"
The idea that anyone would accept a request to a website taking longer than 30ms, (the time it takes for a game to render it's entire world including both the CPU and GPU parts at 60fps) is insane, and nobody should really accept it, but we commonly do.
> The biggest tool in the performance toolbox is stubbornness. Without it all the mechanical sympathy in the world will go unexploited.
The sympathy is also needed. Problems aren't found when people don't care, or consider the current performance acceptable.
> There’s about a factor of 3 improvement that can be made to most code after the profiler has given up. That probably means there are better profilers than could be written, but in 20 years of having them I’ve only seen 2 that tried.
It's hard for profilers to identify slowdowns that are due to the architecture. Making the function do less work to get its result feels different from determining that the function's result is unnecessary.
I'm curious, what're the profilers you know of that tried to be better? I have a little homebrew game engine with an integrated profiler that I'm always looking for ideas to make more effective.
hinkley|4 months ago
There’s about a factor of 3 improvement that can be made to most code after the profiler has given up. That probably means there are better profilers than could be written, but in 20 years of having them I’ve only seen 2 that tried. Sadly I think flame graphs made profiling more accessible to the unmotivated but didn’t actually improve overall results.
Negitivefrags|4 months ago
If you see a database query that takes 1 hour to run, and only touches a few gb of data, you should be thinking "Well nvme bandwidth is multiple gigabytes per second, why can't it run in 1 second or less?"
The idea that anyone would accept a request to a website taking longer than 30ms, (the time it takes for a game to render it's entire world including both the CPU and GPU parts at 60fps) is insane, and nobody should really accept it, but we commonly do.
zahlman|4 months ago
The sympathy is also needed. Problems aren't found when people don't care, or consider the current performance acceptable.
> There’s about a factor of 3 improvement that can be made to most code after the profiler has given up. That probably means there are better profilers than could be written, but in 20 years of having them I’ve only seen 2 that tried.
It's hard for profilers to identify slowdowns that are due to the architecture. Making the function do less work to get its result feels different from determining that the function's result is unnecessary.
jesse__|4 months ago
I'm curious, what're the profilers you know of that tried to be better? I have a little homebrew game engine with an integrated profiler that I'm always looking for ideas to make more effective.
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
seg_lol|3 months ago