[bofersen]

Author here, kinda sorta. I should've been a bit more specific than that. You can have a profile showing a function taking up 99% of the time, but when you dive into it, there's no clear bottleneck. But just because there's no bottleneck, that doesn't mean it's optimized; vice versa-a well-optimized program can have a bottleneck that's already been cycle-squeezed to hell and back.

What I wanted to say was that a spiky profile provides a clear path to optimizing a piece of code, whereas a flat profile usually means there are more fundamental issues (inefficient memory management, pointer chasing all over the place, convoluted object system, etc.).

[saghm]

It sounds like a flat profile essentially is a local optimum, compared to cases where there's a path "upwards" along a hill to some place more optimal that doesn't require completely changing your strategy.

[bofersen]

That's actually a good observation, yeah. It's often the case that you dig deeper and deeper and find some incomprehensible spaghetti and just say "fuck it, I'll just do what I can here, should be enough".