[HN Gopher] 5 minutes of coding yields a 6%+ boost to Linux I/O ...
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5 minutes of coding yields a 6%+ boost to Linux I/O performance
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-01-16 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| How many hours, days, weeks of thinking?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Axboe shared about his latest interesting Linux I/O
| performance optimization, "Something I've had in the back of my
| mind for years, and finally did it today. Which is kind of sad,
| since it was literally a 5 min job, yielding a more than 6%
| improvement. Would likely be even larger on a full scale distro
| style kernel config."
|
| Seems irrelevant. From the sound of it this was something that
| would always have been easy for him to do. He just never got to
| do it until now.
| nomel wrote:
| Even in open source software, the eyes of many will never
| come close to the brains of one (for better or worse).
| sophacles wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. Lots of stuff gets put in "the back of my
| mind" because I'm not sure how to do it immediately. Maybe
| I'll think about it occasionally, or note a consequence like
| "oh this would be affected if I get around to X". Then when I
| actually sit down to do it weeks or months later it seams
| easy - even though when I first thought it I wasn't sure how
| to even do it.
|
| Point being- it's pretty unlikely that something bouncing
| around the back of someone's head for years would have taken
| 5 minutes to do right away, just as it's unlikely that it
| would have taken 6 years if they'd started when they first
| had the thought. I suspect there's been some amount of
| thinking, and potentially that other work was subtly
| influenced by this thought so that finally doing the task was
| "easy".
| droningparrot wrote:
| It may have taken 5 minutes to write the code, but it sounds like
| they spent years thinking about the change to make.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| That's what I always tell at work.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It takes less than 5 minutes to write out the Standard Model
| Lagrangian too :)
| blibble wrote:
| the amount of codebases I've worked on that spend most of their
| CPU time measuring the time is not inconsequential
| jl6 wrote:
| I am reminded of the story of the plumber who was called to fix a
| water leak. He replaced a washer and charged $100. The client was
| outraged: "That washer was only a dollar's worth of parts!"
|
| The plumber replied: "Sure. I'm charging you $1 for the washer
| and $99 for knowing where to fit it."
| andersource wrote:
| Sounds like a variation of the Ford-GE $10k chalk mark story:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2b4n7a/til_h...
| dublin wrote:
| This famous "granddaddy of them all" story about knowing
| where to make a chalk mark was validated in a 1965 letter to
| the editor of Life magazine. Although most Internet sources
| act as though this story is apocryphal, it has some real (if
| not conclusive) provenance, and definitely fits the known
| personality quirks of both Henry Ford and Charles
| Steinmetz...
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| More generic $50K version:
| https://www.et.byu.edu/~tom/jokes/Consultant_Engineer.html
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Everyone knows that programming is just typing.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Now I've got to copy and paste out of the ChatGPT window too.
| That's two extra steps.
| zwieback wrote:
| Title should be "Six years of thinking allow programmer to solve
| problem in 5 minutes".
|
| I remember contracting for IBM in the 90s and we had a huge
| performance boost due to caching and, like the anecdote in this
| post, there was a slight chance of something going out of date.
| The IBM guys said "no thanks, IBM prefers bullet proof over
| fast".
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Then ibm got outpaced by the rest of industry.
|
| Bulletproof typically means rigid in design. Trading one bag of
| worms for another.
| zwieback wrote:
| Yep, especially as IT moved downmarket from mainframes run by
| government, military and large corporations to the average
| Joe, who can reboot, reinstall or just buy a new one.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > Title should be "Six years of thinking allow programmer to
| solve problem in 5 minutes".
|
| "You didn't pay me $1k to press three buttons; you paid me $1k
| for knowing which three buttons to press."
|
| EDIT: oh, i see a version of this was already posted in another
| comment :)
| harshaw wrote:
| this is a pretty standard performance win to avoid constantly
| getting the time when you don't need it. Certainly seen this win
| at work (AWS) but also likely in various other projects
| repeatedly. But bias for action for getting it done!
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah. We use and cache rdtsc a fair amount to avoid its
| relatively high overhead in the storage stack I'm working on as
| well.
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