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Cliff Click's Crash Course In Modern Hardware
Lord Straxus writes "In this presentation (video) from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click talks about why it's almost impossible to tell what an x86 chip is really doing to your code due to all of the crazy kung-fu and ninjitsu it does to your code while it's running. This talk is an excellent drill-down into the internals of the x86 chip, and it's a great way to get an understanding of what really goes on down at the hardware and why certain types of applications run so much faster than other types of applications. Dr. Cliff really knows his stuff!"
That's not entirely true. In performance-sensitive tight loops, it can still make sense to code in ASM to avoid pipeline bubbles and stalls in some very limited situations. Also, the compiler doesn't always take advantage of instructions that it could use.
However, determining that takes a lot of effort and a lot of instrumentation, and so you'd better really need that last bit of performance before you go after it.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Having spent 4 years being one of the primary developers of Apple's main performance analysis tools (CHUD, not Instruments) and having helped developers from nearly every field imaginable tune their applications for performance, I can honestly say that regardless of your performance criteria, you shouldn't be doing anything special for optimization when you first write a program. Some thought should be given to the architecture and overall data flow of the program and how that design might have some high-level performance limits, but certainly no code should be written using explicit vector operations and all loops should be written for clarity. Scalability by partitioning the work is one of those items that can generally be incorporated into the program's architecture if the program lends itself to it, but most other performance-related changes depend on specific usage cases. Trying to guess those while writing the application logic relies solely on intuition which is usually wrong.
After you've written and debugged the application, profiling and tracing is the prime way for finding _where_ to do optimization. Your experiences have been tainted by the poor quality of tools known by the larger OSS community, but many good tools are free (as in beer) for many OSes (Shark for OS X as an example) while others cost a bit (VTune for Linux or Windows). Even large, complex multi-threaded programs can be profiled and tuned with decent profilers. I know for a fact that Shark is used to tune large applications such as Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Mathematica, and basically every application, daemon, and framework included in OS X.
What do you do if there really isn't much of a hotspot? Quake 3 was an example where the time was spread out over many C++ methods so no one hotspot really showed up. Using features available in the better profiling tools, the collected samples could be attributed up the stack to the actual algorithms instead of things like simple accessors. Once you do that, the problems become much more obvious.
What do you do after the application has been written and a major performance problem is found that would require an architectural change? Well, you change the architecture. The reason for not doing it during the initial design is that predicting performance issues is near impossible even for those of us who have spent years doing it as a full time job. Sure, you have to throw away some code or revisit the design to fix the performance issues, but that's a normal part of software design. You try an approach, find out why it won't work, and use that knowledge to come up with a new approach.
That largest failing I see from my experiences have been the lack of understanding by management and engineers that performance is a very iterative part of software design and that it happens late in the game. Frequently, schedules get set without consideration for the amount of time required to do performance analysis, let alone optimization. Then you have all the engineers who either try to optimize everything they encounter and end up wasting lots of time, or they do the initial implementation and never do any profiling.
Ultimately, if you try to build performance into a design very early, you end up with a big, messy, unmaintainable code base that isn't actually all that fast. If you build the design cleanly and then optimize the sections that actually need it, you have a most maintainable code base that meets the requirements. Be the latter.
kc8apf
Over the years, I've grown to hate this meme. Not because it isn't right, but because it stops ten floors below the penthouse of human potential.
First of all, it's an incredible instance of cultural drift. In the mid 1980s, when this meme was halfway current, I worked on adding support for Asian characters to an Asian-made PC. On the "make it right" pass it took 15s to update the screen after pressing the page down key, and this from assembly language. Slower than YouTube over 300 baud. It was doing a lot of pixel swizzling it shouldn't have been, because the fonts were supplied in a format better suited to printing. This was an order of magnitude below an invitation to whiffle-ball training camp. This was Lance Armstrong during his chemotherapy years towing a baby trailer. Today you get 60fps with a 100 thousand or a 100 million polygons, I've sort of lost track.
Let's not shunt performance onto the side track of irrelevancy. While there's no good excuse, ever, for writing faulty code, an enlightened balance between starting out with an approach you can live with, and exploiting necessary cleverness *within your ability* goes a long way.
How about we update Knuth's arthritic maxim? Don't tweak what you don't grok. If you grok, use your judgement. Exploit your human potential. Live a little.
The books I've been reading lately about the evolution of skills in the work place suggest that painstaking reductive work processes are on their way to India. Job security in home world is greatly enhanced if you can navigate multiple agendas in tandem, exploiting more of that judgement thing.
One of the reasons Carmack became so successful is that he didn't waste his effort looking for excuses to deprive his co-workers of their oxygen bits. Instead he conducted shrewd excursions along the edge of the envelope in pursuit of the sweet spot between cleverness too oppressive to live with, and no performance at all.
In my day of deprecating my elders, I always knew where the pea was hidden under the mattress. These days, there are so many squishy mattresses stacked one upon the other, I have to plan my work day with a step ladder. Which I think is what this unwatchable cult-encoded video is on about: the ankle level view most of us never see any more.
Here's another thing. I've you're going to be clever about how you code something, also be clever about how you do it. In other words, be equally clever all levels of the solution process simultaneously: algorithm selection, implementation, commenting, software engineering, documentation, and unit test. Knuth got away with TeX, barely, for precisely this reason. Because of his cleverness, the extension to handle Asian languages was far from elegant. Because of his cleverness (in making everything else run extremely well), people actually wanted to extend TeX to handle Asian languages. So who's to say he was wrong? Despite his cleverness, he managed to keep his booboo score in single or low double digits. His bug tracking database fit nicely on an index card.
In the modern era, people quote the old "make it right before you make it faster" as the cure for the halitosis of ineptitude: you're feeble and irritating, so practice your social graces. Don't make me come over there and choke off your oxygen bit. It's a long ways from saying "you have a lot of human potential, and not much experience, so let me help you confront the challenges in a meaningful way". These sayings leak a lot of sentiment about social engagement.
Every so often I have to pull up a chair beside a junior resource and go "Dude, you're jousting at windmills here, let's roll that change back and try again. I know you can do better." Five minutes of war stories about how to shoot yourself in the foot six ways from Sunday is usually enough to rebalance the flywheel of self preservation.