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Think Like a Customer, Use Your Stopwatch


Hands-on developers give their opinions of the various performance optimization strategies

By SD Times News Team
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October 15, 2004 —  (Page 1 of 7)
oftware performance tuning can get downright emotional. When their code isn’t working right, you might almost see programmers cry, or swear. Maybe both.

Often behind this empathy, however, is a cool and clear-eyed assessment about what it takes to tune and optimize software. Tools for profiling and debugging code can help, but many experienced developers still lean heavily on common sense and simple techniques.

One of these techniques is to stop tuning when the effort is no longer worth it. Another is to think holistically, even while delving into the minutiae of an optimization project.

As a software scientist at Adobe Systems Inc., Rich Gerber spends much time in minutiae—so much that he still regularly writes in assembly language. But his performance testing of Adobe Premier often doesn’t involve sophisticated tools or arcane knowledge.

“I just use the application the way a user would while using the simplest of all tools—a stopwatch,” said Gerber. Much of his time is spent trying out the MPEG encoder or filter, just as any video enthusiast might.

Gerber concedes that he does use some of Adobe’s own testing and instrumentation tools, as well as products such as Intel’s VTune Analyzer, to see which parts of the application are running slower than the rest.

Tuning can be as simple as turning on compiler flags and seeing what happens. “Sometimes, that gives you the performance you are looking for and you’re done,” he said.

When you still need more performance, changing the algorithm or optimizing for some of the newer processor instructions, such as single-instruction multiple data (SIMD), will boost things even more.

While working on tuning tasks, Gerber and his team of developers avoid tweaks that will be too difficult to maintain in the future. “Avoid creating unmaintainable code in the name of performance”, said Gerber. “If the original author gets hit by a bus, you want to be able to make changes.”




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