On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<[email protected]<simetrical%[email protected]>
> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Brian <[email protected]> wrote:
> > apachebench does help with efficiency. It is inefficient (not to mention
> > irresponsible) to wait to benchmark your code until you have a throng of
> > users actually relying on it. Apachebench will allow you to set the
> header
> > needed to trigger the language content shift in mediawiki while
> > simultaneously hammering the server with such requests.  Please think
> before
> > being hypercritical of reasonable suggestions.
>
> Number one: suggesting "use apachebench" is not really helpful,
> because anyone who's even the slightest bit competent knows about it.
> Although I'm sure you were only trying to be helpful, giving very
> basic suggestions can be taken to imply that you have a very low
> opinion of your audience's technical knowledge, and tends to offend
> people.
>

Quite the contrary, if I were to engage in a long diatribe about the
benefits of apachebench it could be taken to mean I have a very low opinion
of my audience's technical knowledge. There are lots of technologies out
there, sometimes folks just need a pointer.


> Number two: no, it's not inefficient to profile instead of benchmark.
> Benchmarking is artificial and will not trigger real usage patterns.
> It's inefficient to waste effort tracking down and fixing performance
> problems that might not arise in the real world, and at the same time
> a real-life usage pattern could very easily trigger something your
> benchmarking tool missed.  Real-time profiling mostly allows serious
> performance problems to be identified and fixed within minutes, so
> it's not irresponsible at all to use it.
>

Benchmarking is not artificial by necessity - only by a lack of proper
technique. If you can't get accurate profiling data by using benchmarks then
you don't know how to benchmark.


> Number three: individuals' histories of contributions, both to
> discussion and to actual code, are normally taken into account by
> people responding to them.
>

elitism++. I suppose I should send you my resume before I send my next
message to the list.
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