again, as long as you do not make one step forward into actual code, we will continue to have what we have today, as this is the best what we have.
you made your statement: "Clear code will allow for more radical improvements as more eyes will be able to easily understand the inner workings and offer better algorithms", Not a single person here would ever dispute this statement, but unfortunately there is no compiler that executes such statements. Make a patch that utilizes this "clear-code" paradigm, show us these better algorithms on actual example and than say: "without LUCENE-1172 I was able to improve XYZ feature by using ABC algorithm". That would work smooth. Anyhow, I am not going to write more on this topic, sorry for the noise... And Robert, please do not get this wrong, I see your point and I respect it! I just felt slight unfairness to the people that make the hands dirty writing as clear and fast code as possible. ----- Original Message ---- From: robert engels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org Sent: Monday, 11 February, 2008 9:55:02 AM Subject: Re: [jira] Created: (LUCENE-1172) Small speedups to DocumentsWriter I am not disputing that there is a speed improvement. I am disputing that the performance gain of many of these patches is not worth the additional complexity in the code. Clear code will allow for more radical improvements as more eyes will be able to easily understand the inner workings and offer better algorithms, not just micro improvements that the JVM (eventually) can probably figure out on its own. It is a value judgement, and regretfully I don't have another 30 years to pass down the full knowledge behind my reasoning. Luckily, however, there are some very good books available on the subject... It's not the fault of the submitter, but many of these timings are suspect due to difficulty in measuring the improvements accurately. Here is a simple example: You can configure the JVM to not perform aggressive garbage collection, and write a program that generates a lot garbage - but it runs very fast (not GCing), until the GC eventually occurs (if the program runs long enough). It may be overall much slower than an alternative that runs slower as it executes, but has code to manage the objects as they are created, and rarely if ever hits a GC cycle. But then, the JVM (e.g. generational GC) can implement improvements that makes choice A faster (and the better choice)... and the cycle continues... Without detailed timings and other metrics (GC pauses, IO, memory utilization, native compilation, etc.) most benchmarks are not very accurate or useful. There are a lot of variables to consider - maybe more so than can reasonably be considered. That is why a 4% gain is highly suspect. If the gain was 25%, or 50% or 100%, you have a better chance of it being an innate improvement, and not just the interaction of some other factors. On Feb 11, 2008, at 2:32 AM, eks dev wrote: > Robert, > > you may or may not be right, I do not know. The only way to prove > it would be to show you can do it better, no? > If you are so convinced this is wrong, you could, much better than > quoting textbooks: > > a) write better patch, get attention with something you think is > "better bottleneck" > b) provide realistic "performance tests" as you dispute the > measurement provided here > > It has to be that concrete, academic discussions are cool, but at > the end of a day, it is the code that executes that counts. > > cheers, > eks > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: robert engels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org > Sent: Sunday, 10 February, 2008 9:15:30 PM > Subject: Re: [jira] Created: (LUCENE-1172) Small speedups to > DocumentsWriter > > I am not sure these numbers matter. I think they are skewed because > you are probably running too short a test, and the index is in memory > (or OS cache). > > Once you use a real index that needs to read/write from the disk, the > percentage change will be negligible. > > This is the problem with many of these "performance changes" - they > just aren't real world enough. Even if they were, I would argue that > code simplicity/maintainability is worth more than 6 seconds on a > operation that takes 4 minutes to run... > > There are many people that believe micro benchmarks are next to > worthless. A good rule of thumb is that if the optimization doesn't > result in 2x speedup, it probably shouldn't be done. In most cases > any efficiency gains are later lost in maintainability issues. > > See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_(computer_science) > > Almost always there is a better bottleneck somewhere. > > On Feb 10, 2008, at 1:37 PM, Michael McCandless wrote: > >> >> Yonik Seeley wrote: >> >>> I wonder how well a single generic quickSort(Object[] arr, int low, >>> int high) would perform vs the type-specific ones? I guess the main >>> overhead would be a cast from Object to the specific class to do the >>> compare? Too bad Java doesn't have true generics/templates. >> >> >> OK I tested this. >> >> Starting from the patch on LUCENE-1172, which has 3 quickSort methods >> (one per type), I created a single quickSort method on Object[] that >> takes a Comparator, and made 3 Comparators instead. >> >> Mac OS X 10.4 (JVM 1.5): >> >> original patch --> 247.1 >> simplified patch --> 254.9 (3.2% slower) >> >> Windows Server 2003 R64 (JVM 1.6): >> >> original patch --> 440.6 >> simplified patch --> 452.7 (2.7% slower) >> >> The times are best in 10 runs. I'm running all tests with these JVM >> args: >> >> -Xms1024M -Xmx1024M -Xbatch -server >> >> I think this is a big enough difference in performance that it's >> worth keeping 3 separate quickSorts in DocumentsWriter. >> >> Mike >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > __________________________________________________________ > Sent from Yahoo! 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