5 ms·

I liked this post, not only for showing an overview of all the big and small wins but also for showing approaches that were tried and didn't work out. It's nic

I liked this post, not only for showing an overview of all the big and small wins but also for showing approaches that were tried and didn't work out. It's nice to see someone write about failures in a very neutral and informative way, as it is a daily part of our jobs and life but most of what you read online is (logically) about successes.

glangdale 8y ago
Good point. I'm working on a project at the moment that's 100% performance oriented and it's sort of a pain to think about writing about it responsibly - i.e. keeping all the intermediate steps and half-good ideas around (and bug-free, and sorta-usable) long enough to be able to do performance analysis on all the stuff. It's hard not just to sweep all the bad ideas and half-way steps under the rug and hit the world with this "aren't I clever" looking final product (without really helping anyone learn how to get there themselves on their own projects).
- acdha 8y ago
  One of the other benefits is keeping those notes around in case some assumptions change in the future and the optimization you picked is no longer viable.
  - glangdale 8y ago
    Absolutely, yes. Or the optimization landscape suddenly changes. I had a super-cool trick for doing state transitions in a DFA at the rate of the throughput of a shuffle instruction rather than at the rate of the latency of a shuffle instruction, and smugly congratulated myself about how well it worked on Ivy Bridge (latency = 1, reciprocal throughput = 0.5). Then Haswell came along and took over the second shuffle capability to do 256-bit shuffles (latency = 1, throughput = 1). So the clever trick went obsolete overnight. :-(
    - acdha 8y ago
      I remember a few stories like that back in the P3/P4/AMD era where a researcher ended up ripping out his hand-tuned assembly because the C reference implementation was increasingly faster. It was really good that they were very conscientious about testing both implementations regularly so there was zero concern about subtle incompatibility.
e12e 8y ago
You might also enjoy the recently featured: "Sloc Cloc and Code – What Happened on the Way to Faster Cloc" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232884

glangdale 8y ago

Good point. I'm working on a project at the moment that's 100% performance oriented and it's sort of a pain to think about writing about it responsibly - i.e. keeping all the intermediate steps and half-good ideas around (and bug-free, and sorta-usable) long enough to be able to do performance analysis on all the stuff. It's hard not just to sweep all the bad ideas and half-way steps under the rug and hit the world with this "aren't I clever" looking final product (without really helping anyone learn how to get there themselves on their own projects).

acdha 8y ago
One of the other benefits is keeping those notes around in case some assumptions change in the future and the optimization you picked is no longer viable.
- glangdale 8y ago
  Absolutely, yes. Or the optimization landscape suddenly changes. I had a super-cool trick for doing state transitions in a DFA at the rate of the throughput of a shuffle instruction rather than at the rate of the latency of a shuffle instruction, and smugly congratulated myself about how well it worked on Ivy Bridge (latency = 1, reciprocal throughput = 0.5). Then Haswell came along and took over the second shuffle capability to do 256-bit shuffles (latency = 1, throughput = 1). So the clever trick went obsolete overnight. :-(
  - acdha 8y ago
    I remember a few stories like that back in the P3/P4/AMD era where a researcher ended up ripping out his hand-tuned assembly because the C reference implementation was increasingly faster. It was really good that they were very conscientious about testing both implementations regularly so there was zero concern about subtle incompatibility.

e12e 8y ago

You might also enjoy the recently featured: "Sloc Cloc and Code – What Happened on the Way to Faster Cloc" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232884