3 ms·

Look, from a utilitarian perspective, let's say we want to optimize the total amount of time globally. Let's say FreeBSD dev spends 2 hours fixing a problem th

by hnfong 3y ago

Look, from a utilitarian perspective, let's say we want to optimize the total amount of time globally. Let's say FreeBSD dev spends 2 hours fixing a problem that gives a 2ms improvement to the boot time. Let's assume conservatively that FreeBSD gets booted 1000 times every day globally. That's 2 seconds per day. Scale that to 10 years and you break even. Nobody cares about "your bicycle" or your internal CRUD app that has maybe 30 users, but FreeBSD is widely used and any minor improvements on it can be presumed to be worth the time fixing. Maybe you have an axe to grind on the topic of premature optimization, but this FreeBSD fix doesn't seem to be the showcase of developers wasting their time doing meaningless optimizations.

taeric 3y ago
This is silly, though. For many reasons. First, I have no axe to grind. They found a trivial change that can be made and made it. Probably even simplified the code, as they used a better search that was introduced later in the codebase. Kudos on that! Second, it also clearly took them more than 2 hours. They've been working at making it faster for many days at this point. So, it will take them a long long time to realize this particular gain. Finally, my only two "criticisms" this entire time were on calling this a 7% improvement and claiming that searching for this would be a waste of most teams time. Consider, from that headline most folks should assume that they can get their EC2 instance that is running FreeBSD 7% faster. But, they clearly won't be able to. They won't even get a lambda invocation 7% faster. Nothing anyone anywhere will ever see will ever be 7%. They may see something 2ms faster, and that is, itself awesome. And may claim that this would be a waste of time to search for is irrelevant for this team. They weren't looking for this particular change to make, of course, so that this "criticism" isn't relevant to them. At all.

by hnfong 3y ago

taeric 3y ago

This is silly, though. For many reasons. First, I have no axe to grind. They found a trivial change that can be made and made it. Probably even simplified the code, as they used a better search that was introduced later in the codebase. Kudos on that! Second, it also clearly took them more than 2 hours. They've been working at making it faster for many days at this point. So, it will take them a long long time to realize this particular gain. Finally, my only two "criticisms" this entire time were on calling this a 7% improvement and claiming that searching for this would be a waste of most teams time. Consider, from that headline most folks should assume that they can get their EC2 instance that is running FreeBSD 7% faster. But, they clearly won't be able to. They won't even get a lambda invocation 7% faster. Nothing anyone anywhere will ever see will ever be 7%. They may see something 2ms faster, and that is, itself awesome. And may claim that this would be a waste of time to search for is irrelevant for this team. They weren't looking for this particular change to make, of course, so that this "criticism" isn't relevant to them. At all.