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Balancing Memory Usage vs Performance?
TwistedTR writes "I work for a company currently developing an application to run in an environment with a very small sum of available memory (sub 6 megs). My boss and I are in disagreement over speed vs memory overhead. He feels that speed is 100% key reguardless of the memory overhead required to meet it. The application is very math intensive so the more lookup tables we pre-generate at load time the faster the overall application runs. However, my boss is having me take us dangerously to the point where our target environment is going to run out of memory. The application makes use of user inputted data, and if the user so chooses it can be a WHOLE lot of data, which also uses a decent chunk of memory. My boss will not fold on my request to sacrifice some speed to prevent a possible fatal memory fill up. Has anyone out there had experience in dealing with developing in a simmilar situation, and if so do you have any ideas of how to balance performance vs memory on such a restrictive environment?"
>Just because you can't run Lunix under 64k doesn't mean Bill Gates is wrong.
You are lying.
Lunix is designed to run on the Commodore 64, which has only 64k of RAM memory (and only about 30-40k free at that).
Posting as non-anonymous because I'm amazed that trolls keep using a misspelling of Linux as some kind of insult when its actually a totally different piece of software...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Well if the project flops because there isn't enough memory, then it will be the boss who takes the blame, not you, so I suggest just go along and agree with him, then laugh at him at the end when the code has to be rewritten and say "I told you so".
--jquirke
Three years back I was the development lead of a certain project. The project design was to be reviewed by a person from some other group. The reviewer in my opinion was a excellent speaker but nothing more than. Because of the reviewer's expierece he/she carried a lot of weight in the organization. The project had several complexities which utimately meant that other than me, the reviewer was the only person with the right 'qualifications' to understand the system. The UI design had already met customer approval, so only the behind the scenes stuff was under review.
The design review came back with several comments abouts the scalability of the application, performance, stability etc. with buzzwords in appropiate places. Most of the comments very total BS. I tried to fight those arguments, but with little sucess. My boss had little understanding about how the whole thing would work, but sided with the reviewer because of his/her credentials. After several days of impasse I finally caved-in and changed the design document to match the reviewer's ideas. However, the finally code was based on my original design. No one knew. My boss was happy, the reviewer was happy and I was happy. 3 years later the customer needs have increased by 5 times the original planned system capacity, but it has performed flawlessly.
I am not suggesting you do the same. I was I playing a dangerous game - one that was necessary for the project's success.