Re: The performance of Editplus is much better than notepad,Why?

I have a friend who works for company that has massive databases (terabytes, and his group
is charged with researching the problems of petabyte databases). Their attitude: disk
access matters. NOTHING else matters. Once the data is in memory, performance is
irrelevant. Code size doesn't matter. Memory footprint doesn't matter. Disk access
matters. Everything else is so trivial by comparison that it is irrelevant. (They're
equipping their labs with AMD64s with tens of gigabytes of RAM. Memory is free. CPUs are
free. Disks are free. Getting the data from the disk to memory isn't free).

We've essentially eliminated all the old problems, and the scaling factors introduce
problems we never imagined. Unfortunately, he can't tell me anything about what they're
actually doing...this is the crown jewels of their next-generation product. But he says
the work is "interesting".

You've also pointed out another intresting issue: well written code runs well. As long
as you don't do anything stupid like bubble sort on megaelement arrays or linear search in
disk files, clean code is good code.
joe

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:35:01 GMT, Dan Bloomquist <public21@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Joseph M. Newcomer wrote:

<hate to snip what is worth while>

And here is my experience...

I had a report generator that was starting to feel klugey. So for the
last major upgrade I rewrote the engine. (And of course, the engine
doesn't know anything about my product. I knew I would have to version
the client's projects, but felt it was worth it.)

My goal was a more robust and versatile engine. There were a couple of
performance issues but that was not the goal. Funny thing is that when
it was done, it was a good three or more times faster than the previous
version. It may have been two if I had not given the performance
attention? Was it worth it? I'd say yes. (Keep in mind it was not the
reason for the rewrite.) I have clients that will produce reports that
are up to 1000 pages. It takes time to build containers that will random
access big reports.

My point would be that performance is secondary. (And not memory, not
worth it. I agree.) But that writing more robust code, first, will yield
performance in a natural way. It may be that if the writer focuses on
the wrong objective it would be a lot like hitting your thumb with a
hammer repeatedly.

(BTW, my first machine was an Apple One and memory was precious!)

Best, Dan.
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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