4 ms·

"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM" is one of those soundbites that people seem to find clever, but really shows a startling lack of under

by ajg1977 16y ago

"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM" is one of those soundbites that people seem to find clever, but really shows a startling lack of understanding. You can chuck as much RAM as you like at your problem but it's not going to help once your data set fits in memory - and maybe way before that if you're thrashing those piddly L3 and L2 cache's.

ComputerGuru 16y ago
That's why I prefer "Buying RAM is for people who don't know how to write Algorithms." found in the comments :)
newt 16y ago
"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM"... really shows a startling lack of understanding Are you perhaps missing that it's a deliberate inversion of the more obvious statement "needing more RAM is for people who don't know how to use Algorithms" in order to make the point that RAM is cheaper than an engineer's time?
- nervechannel 16y ago
  But many interesting problems can't be solved by throwing more RAM at them, because RAM isn't the bottleneck.
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    Are you suggesting that Jeff Atwood may be exaggerating?
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    Which is why you solve the boring problems by throwing RAM at them, and spend the time you just saved solving the interesting ones. :0
rbanffy 16y ago
> way before that if you're thrashing those piddly L3 and L2 cache's. And that's why knowing your hardware and your workload is important. I remember once we had a performance problem with a x86 server. Over lunch, the guy with the problem told me the working dataset was about 8 megs per batch or so. I told him to move the workload to an Itanium server we had for testing because I knew that server had 11 megs of L2 cache, besides being slightly faster per instruction than the Xeon that was running the workload. The throughput more than tripled. It breaks my heart when people just assume more memory/GHz/cores is always faster.

by ajg1977 16y ago

ComputerGuru 16y ago

That's why I prefer "Buying RAM is for people who don't know how to write Algorithms." found in the comments :)

newt 16y ago

"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM"... really shows a startling lack of understanding Are you perhaps missing that it's a deliberate inversion of the more obvious statement "needing more RAM is for people who don't know how to use Algorithms" in order to make the point that RAM is cheaper than an engineer's time?

nervechannel 16y ago
But many interesting problems can't be solved by throwing more RAM at them, because RAM isn't the bottleneck.
- alextgordon 16y ago
  Are you suggesting that Jeff Atwood may be exaggerating?
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Which is why you solve the boring problems by throwing RAM at them, and spend the time you just saved solving the interesting ones. :0

rbanffy 16y ago

> way before that if you're thrashing those piddly L3 and L2 cache's. And that's why knowing your hardware and your workload is important. I remember once we had a performance problem with a x86 server. Over lunch, the guy with the problem told me the working dataset was about 8 megs per batch or so. I told him to move the workload to an Itanium server we had for testing because I knew that server had 11 megs of L2 cache, besides being slightly faster per instruction than the Xeon that was running the workload. The throughput more than tripled. It breaks my heart when people just assume more memory/GHz/cores is always faster.