[om-list] When not to optimize

[Thomas and Megan Packer]

Mark

    Is this "four order effect" stuff standard nomenclature?  Do you know a
good source that explains these nth order effects?

tomp

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Butler" <butlerm at middle.net>
To: "One Model List" <om-list at onemodel.org>
Sent: Saturday, 09 March, 2002 20:20
Subject: [om-list] When not to optimize


Hello everyone,

Here is an excerpt of a very interesting article on optimization:

Optimization: Your Worst Enemy
by Joseph M. Newcomer
[http://www.pgh.net/~newcomer/optimization.htm]

"Now there's a title to grab your attention! But I'm serious!" ...

"A reasonably skilled programmer will not write a grossly inefficient
program. At least not deliberately. Optimization is what you do when the
performance is insufficient. Sometimes the optimizations are easy, sometimes
they are hard. Sometimes they fly in the face of your original design, and
sometimes they require that you grossly violate your beautiful abstractions
in your class system. But always, and I repeat, always, my experience has
been that no programmer has ever been able to predict or analyze where
performance bottlenecks are without data. No matter where you think the time
is going, you will be surprised to discover that it is going somewhere else.

You optimize because you have a problem in performance. Sometimes it is
computational optimization: your bitmap manipulation is just too slow.
Sometimes it is data access optimization: it just takes too long to get the
data into the machine. And sometimes it is algorithmic optimization: you're
doing it wrong. If you don't understand the difference between an n2 sort
and an n log n sort, you're probably already in trouble, but that knowledge
alone is not useful." ....

[Rest of article at http://www.pgh.net/~newcomer/optimization.htm]


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