4 ms·
> Hieroglyphs or not, with some human cleverness you can achieve pretty amazing performance. I'll never forget hand-optimizing some DNA analysis code into asse
by inetknght 3y ago
> Hieroglyphs or not, with some human cleverness you can achieve pretty amazing performance.
I'll never forget hand-optimizing some DNA analysis code into assembly and achieving the theoretical performance bottleneck that is the memory throughput between the CPU and main RAM on a server with 800GB of RAM.
Taking something that took minutes and turning it into something that takes seconds is a flipping amazing feeling.
Could it get even faster? Probably, but that would require very significant data structure changes with an algorithmic change to match. Would it be worth it? Well, probably when the database reaches multiple TB in size. But I've since moved on from that company so it's someone else's problem.
- vardump 3y agoIt's often about memory bandwidth nowadays. That and locality of reference, random access is expensive. You can compute a ton for the cost of one random memory access.
- kjs3 3y agoTangential Question (purely curious): How to you validate your code produces the same (presumedly correct) results as the non-optimized (presumedly HLL) code for something as complex and variable as DNA analysis? I run into an analogous concern when people talk about "we need to rewrite this exhaustively tested with decades of track record Fortran 77 code in (whatever the new hotness in PLT is)".