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Oftentimes a developer will be faced with a choice between two possible ways to solve a problem -- one that is idiomatic and readable, and another that is less intuitive, but may perform better. For example, in C-based languages, there are two ways to multiply a number by 2:
int SimpleMultiplyBy2(int x)
{
return x * 2;
}
and
int FastMultiplyBy2(int x)
{
return x << 1;
}
The first version is simpler to pick up for both technical and non-technical readers, but the second one may perform better, since bit shifting is a simpler operation than multiplication. (For now, let's assume that the compiler's optimizer would not detect this and optimize it, though that is also a consideration).
As a developer, which would be better as an initial attempt?
You missed one.
First code for correctness, then for clarity (the two are often connected, of course!). Finally, and only if you have real empirical evidence that you actually need to, you can look at optimizing. Premature optimization really is evil. Optimization almost always costs you time, clarity, maintainability. You'd better be sure you're buying something worthwhile with that.
Note that good algorithms almost always beat localized tuning. There is no reason you can't have code that is correct, clear, and fast. You'll be unreasonably lucky to get there starting off focusing on `fast' though.
IMO the obvious readable version first, until performance is measured and a faster version is required.
Take it from Don Knuth
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
Readability 100%
If your compiler can't do the "x*2" => "x <<1" optimization for you -- get a new compiler!
Also remember that 99.9% of your program's time is spent waiting for user input, waiting for database queries and waiting for network responses. Unless you are doing the multiple 20 bajillion times, it's not going to be noticeable.
Readability for sure. Don't worry about the speed unless someone complains
In your given example, 99.9999% of the compilers out there will generate the same code for both cases. Which illustrates my general rule - write for readability and maintainability first, and optimize only when you need to.
Readability.
Coding for performance has it's own set of challenges. Joseph M. Newcomer said it well
Optimization matters only when it
matters. When it matters, it matters a
lot, but until you know that it
matters, don't waste a lot of time
doing it. Even if you know it matters,
you need to know where it matters.
Without performance data, you won't
know what to optimize, and you'll
probably optimize the wrong thing.
The result will be obscure, hard to
write, hard to debug, and hard to
maintain code that doesn't solve your
problem. Thus it has the dual
disadvantage of (a) increasing
software development and software
maintenance costs, and (b) having no
performance effect at all.
I would go for readability first. Considering the fact that with the kind of optimized languages and hugely loaded machines we have in these days, most of the code we write in readable way will perform decently.
In some very rare scenarios, where you are pretty sure you are going to have some performance bottle neck (may be from some past bad experiences), and you managed to find some weird trick which can give you huge performance advantage, you can go for that. But you should comment that code snippet very well, which will help to make it more readable.
Readability. The time to optimize is when you get to beta testing. Otherwise you never really know what you need to spend the time on.
A often overlooked factor in this debate is the extra time it takes for a programmer to navigate, understand and modify less readible code. Considering a programmer's time goes for a hundred dollars an hour or more, this is a very real cost.
Any performance gain is countered by this direct extra cost in development.
Putting a comment there with an explanation would make it readable and fast.
It really depends on the type of project, and how important performance is. If you're building a 3D game, then there are usually a lot of common optimizations that you'll want to throw in there along the way, and there's no reason not to (just don't get too carried away early). But if you're doing something tricky, comment it so anybody looking at it will know how and why you're being tricky.
The answer depends on the context. In device driver programming or game development for example, the second form is an acceptable idiom. In business applications, not so much.
Your best bet is to look around the code (or in similar successful applications) to check how other developers do it.
If you're worried about readability of your code, don't hesitate to add a comment to remind yourself what and why you're doing this.
using << would by a micro optimization.
So Hoare's (not Knuts) rule:
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
applies and you should just use the more readable version in the first place.
This is rule is IMHO often misused as an excuse to design software that can never scale, or perform well.
Both. Your code should balance both; readability and performance. Because ignoring either one will screw the ROI of the project, which in the end of the day is all that matters to your boss.
Bad readability results in decreased maintainability, which results in more resources spent on maintenance, which results in a lower ROI.
Bad performance results in decreased investment and client base, which results in a lower ROI.
Readability is the FIRST target.
In the 1970's the army tested some of the then "new" techniques of software development (top down design, structured programming, chief programmer teams, to name a few) to determine which of these made a statistically significant difference.
THe ONLY technique that made a statistically significant difference in development was...
ADDING BLANK LINES to program code.
The improvement in readability in those pre-structured, pre-object oriented code was the only technique in these studies that improved productivity.
==============
Optimization should only be addressed when the entire project is unit tested and ready for instrumentation. You never know WHERE you need to optimize the code.
In their landmark books Kernigan and Plauger in the late 1970's SOFTWARE TOOLS (1976) and SOFTWARE TOOLS IN PASCAL (1981) showed ways to create structured programs using top down design. They created text processing programs: editors, search tools, code pre-processors.
When the completed text formating function was INSTRUMENTED they discovered that most of the processing time was spent in three routines that performed text input and output ( In the original book, the i-o functions took 89% of the time. In the pascal book, these functions consumed 55%!)
They were able to optimize these THREE routines and produced the results of increased performance with reasonable, manageable development time and cost.
The larger the codebase, the more readability is crucial. Trying to understand some tiny function isn't so bad. (Especially since the Method Name in the example gives you a clue.) Not so great for some epic piece of uber code written by the loner genius who just quit coding because he has finally seen the top of his ability's complexity and it's what he just wrote for you and you'll never ever understand it.
As almost everyone said in their answers, I favor readability. 99 out of 100 projects I run have no hard response time requirements, so it's an easy choice.
Before you even start coding you should already know the answer. Some projects have certain performance requirements, like 'need to be able to run task X in Y (milli)seconds'. If that's the case, you have a goal to work towards and you know when you have to optimize or not. (hopefully) this is determined at the requirements stage of your project, not when writing the code.
Good readability and the ability to optimize later on are a result of proper software design. If your software is of sound design, you should be able to isolate parts of your software and rewrite them if needed, without breaking other parts of the system. Besides, most true optimization cases I've encountered (ignoring some real low level tricks, those are incidental) have been in changing from one algorithm to another, or caching data to memory instead of disk/network.
If there is no readability , it will be very hard to get performance improvement when you really need it.
Performance should be only improved when it is a problem in your program, there are many places would be a bottle neck rather than this syntax. Say you are squishing 1ns improvement on a << but ignored that 10 mins IO time.
Also, regarding readability, a professional programmer should be able to read/understand computer science terms. For example we can name a method enqueue rather than we have to say putThisJobInWorkQueue.
The bitshift versus the multiplication is a trivial optimization that gains next to nothing. And, as has been pointed out, your compiler should do that for you. Other than that, the gain is neglectable anyhow as is the CPU this instruction runs on.
On the other hand, if you need to perform serious computation, you will require the right data structures. But if your problem is complex, finding out about that is part of the solution. As an illustration, consider searching for an ID number in an array of 1000000 unsorted objects. Then reconsider using a binary tree or a hash map.
But optimizations like n << C are usually neglectible and trivial to change to at any point. Making code readable is not.
It depends on the task needed to be solved. Usually readability is more importrant, but there are still some tasks when you shoul think of performance in the first place. And you can't just spend a day or to for profiling and optimization after everything works perfectly, because optimization itself may require rewriting sufficiant part of a code from scratch. But it is not common nowadays.
I'd say go for readability.
But in the given example, I think that the second version is already readable enough, since the name of the function exactly states, what is going on in the function.
If we just always had functions that told us, what they do ...
You should always maximally optimize, performance always counts. The reason we have bloatware today, is that most programmers don't want to do the work of optimization.
Having said that, you can always put comments in where slick coding needs clarification.
There is no point in optimizing if you don't know your bottlenecks. You may have made a function incredible efficient (usually at the expense of readability to some degree) only to find that portion of code hardly ever runs, or it's spending more time hitting the disk or database than you'll ever save twiddling bits.
So you can't micro-optimize until you have something to measure, and then you might as well start off for readability.
However, you should be mindful of both speed and understandability when designing the overall architecture, as both can have a massive impact and be difficult to change (depending on coding style and methedologies).
It is estimated that about 70% of the cost of software is in maintenance. Readability makes a system easier to maintain and therefore brings down cost of the software over its life.
There are cases where performance is more important the readability, that said they are few and far between.
Before sacrifing readability, think "Am I (or your company) prepared to deal with the extra cost I am adding to the system by doing this?"
I don't work at google so I'd go for the evil option. (optimization)
In Chapter 6 of Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls", he describes how one system had a 400 times speed up by optimizing at 6 different design levels. I believe, that by not caring about performance at these 6 design levels, modern implementors can easily achieve 2-3 orders of magnitude of slow down in their programs.
Readability first. But even more than readability is simplicity, especially in terms of data structure.
I'm reminded of a student doing a vision analysis program, who couldn't understand why it was so slow. He merely followed good programming practice - each pixel was an object, and it worked by sending messages to its neighbors...
check this out
Write for readability first, but expect the readers to be programmers. Any programmer worth his or her salt should know the difference between a multiply and a bitshift, or be able to read the ternary operator where it is used appropriately, be able to look up and understand a complex algorithm (you are commenting your code right?), etc.
Early over-optimization is, of course, quite bad at getting you into trouble later on when you need to refactor, but that doesn't really apply to the optimization of individual methods, code blocks, or statements.
How much does an hour of processor time cost?
How much does an hour of programmer time cost?
IMHO both things have nothing to do. You should first go for code that works, as this is more important than performance or how well it reads. Regarding readability: your code should always be readable in any case.
However I fail to see why code can't be readable and offer good performance at the same time. In your example, the second version is as readable as the first one to me. What is less readable about it? If a programmer doesn't know that shifting left is the same as multiplying by a power of two and shifting right is the same as dividing by a power of two... well, then you have much more basic problems than general readability.
Related
After coming across the code golf trivia around the site it is obvious people try to find ways to write code and algorithms as short as the possibly can in terms of characters, lines and total size, even if that means writing something like:
//Code by: job
//Topic: Code Golf - Collatz Conjecture
n=input()
while n>1:n=(n/2,n*3+1)[n%2];print n
So as a beginner I start to wonder whether size actually matters :D
It is obviously a very subjective question highly dependent on the actual code being used, but what is the rule of thumb in the real world.
In the case that size wont matter, how come then we don't focus more on performance rather than size?
I hope this does not become a flame war. Good code has many attributes, including:
Solving the use-case properly.
Readability.
Maintainability.
Performance.
Testability.
Low memory signature.
Good user interface.
Reusability.
The brevity of code is not that important in 21st century programming. It used to be more important when memory was really scarce. Please see this question, including my answer, for books referencing the attributes above.
A lot of good answers already about what's important versus what's not. In real life, (almost) nobody writes code like code golf, wtih shortened identifiers, minimal whitespace, and the fewest possible statements.
That said, "more code" does correlate with more bugs and complexity, and "less code" tends to correlate with better readability and performance. So all other things being equal, it's useful to strive for shorter code, but only in the sense of "these simple 30 lines of code do the same as that 100 complex lines of code".
Writing "code golf" solutions are often to do with showing how "clever" you are in getting the job done in the most succinct way even at the expense of readability. Quite often, however, more verbose code including, for example, memoization of function results, can be faster. Code size can matter for performance, smaller blocks of code can fit in the L1 CPU cache but this is an extreme case of optimization and a faster algorithm will most always be better. "Code Golf" code is not like production code - always write for clarity & readability of the solution rather than terseness if anyone, including yourself, ever intend to read that code again.
Whitespace has no effect on performance. So code like that is just silly (or perhaps the golf score was based on the character count?). The number of lines also has no effect, although the number of statements can have an effect. (exception: python, where whitespace is significant)
The effect is complex, however. It's not at all uncommon to discover that you have to add statements to a function in order to improve it's performance.
Still, without knowing anything else, bet that more statements is a larger object file, and a slower program. But more lines doesn't do anything other than make code more readable up to a point (after which adding more lines makes it less readable ;)
I don't believe that Code Golf has any practical significance. In practice, readable code is what counts. Which in itself is a conflicting requirement: readable code should be concise, but still easy to understood.
However, I would like to answer your question yet differently. Usually, there are fast and simple algorithms. However, if the speed is top priority, things can get complex real fast (and the resulting code will be longer). I don't believe that simplicity equals speed.
There are many aspects to performance. Performance can for example be measured by memory footprint, speed of execution, bandwith consumption, framerate, maintainability, supportability and so on. Performance usually means spending as little as possible of the most scarce resource.
When applied to networking, brevity IS performance. If your webserver serves a little javascript snippet on every page, it doesn't exactly hurt to keep the variable names short. Pull up www.google.com and view source!
Some times DRY is not helping performance. An example is that Microsoft has found that they don't want a to loop through an array unless it is bigger than 3 elements.
String.Format has signatures for one, two and three arguments, and then for array.
There are many ways of trading one aspect for another. This is usually called caching.
You can for example trade memory footprint for speed of execution. For example by doing lookup instead of execution. It is just a matter of replacing () with [] in most popular languages. If you plan it so that the spaceship in your game can only go in a fixed number of directions, you can save on trigonometric function calls.
Or you can use a proxy server with a cache for looking up things over a network. DNS servers do this all the time.
Finally, if development team availability is the most scarce resource, clarity of code is the best bet for maintainability performance, even if it doesn't run quite as fast or is quite as interesting or "elegant" in code.
Absolutely not. Code size and performance (however you measure it) are only very loosly connected. To make matter worse whats a neat trick on one chip/compiler/OS may very well be the worse thing you can do in another archictecture.
Its counter-intuitive but a clear well written simple as possible implmentation is often far more efficient than than a devious bag of tricks. Today's optimizing compilers like clear uncomplicated code just as much as humans and complex trickery can cause them to abandon thier best optimizing strategies.
Writing fewer lines of code tends to be better for a bunch of reasons. For example, the less code you have, the less chance for bugs. See for example Paul Graham's essay, "Succinctness is Power"
Notwithstanding that, the level reached by Code Golf is usually far beyond what makes sense. In Code Golf, people are trying to write code that is as short as possible, even if they know that it's less readable.
Efficiency is a much harder thing to decide. I'm guessing that less code is usually more efficient, but there are many cases where this isn't true.
So to answer the real question, why do we even have Code Golf competitions which aim at a low character count, if that's not a very important thing?
Two reasons:
Making code as short as possible means you have to be both clever, and know a language pretty well to find all kinds of tricks. This makes it a fun riddle.
Also, it's the easiest measure to use for a code competition. Efficiency, for example, is very hard to measure, especially using many different languages, especially since some solutions are more efficient in some cases, but less in others (big input vs small). Readability: that's a very personal thing, which often leads to heated debates.
In short, I don't think there is any way of doing Code Golf style competitions without using "shortness of code" as the criterion.
This is from "10 Commandments for Java Developers"
Keep in Mind - "Less is more" is not always better. - Code efficiency is a great thing, but > in many situations writing less lines of code does not improve the efficiency of that code.
This is (probably) true for all programming languages (though in assembly it could be different).
It makes a difference if you're talking about little academic-style algorithms or real software, which can be thousands of lines of code. I'm talking about the latter.
Here's an example where a reasonably well-written program was speeded up by a factor of 43x, and it's code size was reduced by 4x.
"Code golf" is just squeezing code, like cramming undergraduates into a phone booth. I'm talking about reducing code by rewriting it in a form that is declarative, like a domain-specific-language (DSL). Since it is declarative, it maps more directly onto its requirements, so it is not puffed up with code that exists only for implementation's sake. That link shows an example of doing that.
This link shows a way of reducing size of UI code in a similar way.
Good performance is achieved by avoiding doing things that don't really have to be done. Of course, when you write code, you're not intentionally making it do unnecessary work, but if you do aggressive performance tuning as in that example, you'd be amazed at what you can remove.
The point of code golf is to optimise for one thing (source length), at the potential expense of everything else (performance, comprehensibility, robustness). If you accidentally improve performance that's a fluke - if you could shave a character off by doubling the runtime, then you would.
You ask "how come then we don't focus more on performance rather than size", but the question is based on a false premise that programmers focus more on code size than on performance. They don't, "code golf" is a minority interest. It's challenging and fun, but it's not important. Look at the number of questions tagged "code-golf" against the number tagged "performance".
As other people point out, making code shorter often means making it simpler to understand, by removing duplication and opportunities for obscure errors. That's usually more important than running speed. But code golf is a completely different thing, where you remove whitespace, comments, descriptive names, etc. The purpose isn't to make the code more comprehensible.
Since I am a Lone Developer, I have to think about every aspect of the systems I am working on. Lately I've been thinking about performance of my two websites, and ways to improve it. Sites like StackOverflow proclaim, "performance is a feature." However, "premature optimization is the root of all evil," and none of my customers have complained yet about the sites' performance.
My question is, is performance always important? Should performance always be a feature?
Note: I don't think this question is the same as this one, as that poster is asking when to consider performance and I am asking if the answer to that question is always, and if so, why. I also don't think this question should be CW, as I believe there is an answer and reasoning for that answer.
Adequate performance is always important.
Absolute fastest possible performance is almost never important.
It's always worth keeping an eye on performance and being aware of anything outrageously non-optimal that you're doing (particularly at a design/architecture level) but that's not the same as micro-optimising every line of code.
Performance != Optimization.
Performance is a feature indeed, but premature optimization will cost you time and will not yield the same result as when you optimize the parts that need optimization. And you can't really know which parts need optimization until you can actually profile something.
Performance is the feature that your clients will not tell you about if it's missing, unless it's really painfully slow and they're forced to use your product. Existing customers may report it in the end, but new customers will simply not bother if the performance is required.
You need to know what performance you need, and formulate it as a requirement. Then, you have to meet your own requirement.
That 'root of all evil' quote is almost always misused and misunderstood.
Designing your application to perform well can be mostly be done with just good design. Good design != premature optimization, and it's utterly ridiculous to go off writing crap code and blowing off doing a better job on the design as an 'evil' waste. Now, I'm not specifically talking about you here... but I see people do this a lot.
It usually saves you time to do a good job on the design. If you emphasize that, you'll get better at it... and get faster and faster at writing systems that perform well from the start.
Understanding what kinds of structures and access methods work best in certain situations is key here.
Sure, if you're app becomes truly massive or has insane speed requirements you may find yourself doing tricked out optimizations that make your code uglier or harder to maintain... and it would be wrong to do those things before you need to.
But that is absolutely NOT the same thing as making an effort to understand and use the right algorithms or data patterns or whatever in the first place.
Your users are probably not going to complain about bad performance if it's bearable. They possibly wouldn't even know it could be faster. Reacting to complaints as a primary driver is a bad way to operate. Sure, you need to address complaints you receive... but a lack of them does not mean there isn't a problem. The fact that you are considering improving performance is a bit of an indicator right there. Was it just a whim, or is some part of you telling you it should be better? Why did you consider improving it?
Just don't go crazy doing unnecessary stuff.
Keep performance in mind but given your situation it would be unwise to spend too much time up front on it.
Performance is important but it's often hard to know where your bottleneck will be. Therefore I'd suggest planning to dedicate some time to this feature once you've got something to work with.
Thus you need to set up metrics that are important to your clients and you. Keep and analyse these measurements. Then estimate how long and how much each would take to implement. Now you can aim on getting as much bang for you buck/time.
If it's web it would be wise to note your page size and performance using Firebug + yslow and/or google page speed. Again, know what applies to a small site like yours and things that only apply to yahoo and google.
Jackson’s Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1. Don’t do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only). Don’t do it
yet— that is, not until you have a
perfectly clear and unoptimized
solution.
—M. A. Jackson
Extracted from Code Complete 2nd edition.
To give a generalized answer to a general question:
First make it work, then make it right, then make it fast.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
This puts a more constructive perspective on "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
So to parallel Jon Skeet's answer, adequate performance (as part of making something work, and making it right) is always important. Even then it can often be addressed after other functionality.
Jon Skeets 'adequate' nails it, with the additional provision that for a library you don't know yet what's adequate, so it's better to err on the safe side.
It is one of the many stakes you must not get wrong, but the quality of your app is largely determined by the weakest link.
Performance is definitely always important in a certain sense - maybe not the one you mean: namely in all phases of development.
In Big O notation, what's inside the parantheses is largely decided by design - both components isolation and data storage. Choice of algorithm will usually only best/worst case behavior (unless you start with decidedly substandard algorithms). Code optimizations will mostly affect the constant factor - which shouldn't be neglected, either.
But that's true for all aspects of code: in any stage, you have a good chance to fail any aspect - stability, maintainability, compatibility etc. Performance needs to be balanced, so that no aspect is left behind.
In most applications 90% or more of execution time is spend in 10% or less of the code. Usually there is little use in optimizing other code than these 10%.
performance is only important to the extent that developing the performance improvement takes less time than the total amount of time that will be saved for the user(s).
the result is that if you're developing something for millions... yeah it's important to save them time. if you're coding up a tool for your own use... it might be more trouble than it's worth to save a minute or even an hour or more.
(this is clearly not a rule set in stone... there are times when performance is truly critical no matter how much development time it takes)
There should be a balance to everything. Cost (or time to develop) vs Performance for instance. More performance = more cost. If a requirement of the system being built is high performance then the cost should not matter, but if cost is a factor then you optimize within reason. After a while, your return on investment suffers in that more performance does not bring in more returns.
The importance of performance is IMHO highly correlated to your problem set. If you are creating a site with an expectation of a heavy load and lot of server side processing, then you might want to put some more time into performance (otherwise your site might end up being unusable). However, for most applications the the time put into optimizing your perfomance on a website is not going to pay off - users won't notice the difference.
So I guess it breaks down to this:
Will users notice the improvements?
How does this improvement compare to competing sites?
If users will notice AND the improvement would be enough to differentiate you from the competition - performance is an important feature - otherwise not so much. (To a point - I don't recommend ignoring it entirely - you don't want your site to turtle along after all).
No. Fast enough is generally good enough.
It's not necessarily true, however, that your client's ideas about "fast enough" should trump your own. If you think it's fast enough and your client doesn't then yes, you need to accommodate your ideas to theirs. But if you're client thinks it's fast enough and you don't you should seriously consider going with your opinion, no theirs (since you may be more knowledgeable about performance standards in the wider world).
How important performance is depends largely and foremost on what you do.
For example, if you write a library that can be used in any environment, this can hardly ever have too much performance. In some environments, a 10% performance advantage can be a major feature for a library.
If you, OTOH, write an application, there's always a point where it is fast enough. Users won't neither realize nor care whether a button pressed reacts within 0.05 or 0.2 seconds - even though that's a factor of 4.
However, it is always easier to get working code faster, than it is to get fast code working.
No. Performance is not important.
Lack of performance is important.
Performance is something to be designed in from the outset, not tacked on at the end. For the past 15 years I have been working in the performance engineering space and the cause of most project failures that I work on is a lack of requirements on performance. A couple of posts have noted "fast enough" as an observation and whether your expectation matches that of your clients, but what about when you have a situation of your client, your architectural team, your platform engineering team, your functional test team, your performance test team and your operations team all have different expectations on performance, none of which have been committed to stone and measured against. Bad Magic to be certain.
Capture those expectations on the part of your clients. Commit them to a specific, objective, measurable requirement that you can evaluate at each stage of production of your software. Expectations may not be uniform, with one section of your app/code needing to be faster than others, nor will each customer have the same expectations on what is considered acceptable. Having this information will force you to confront decisions in the design and implementation that you may have overlooked in the past and it will result in a product which is a better match to your clients expectations.
I am currently working for a client who are petrified of changing lousy un-testable and un-maintainable code because of "performance reasons". It is clear that there are many misconceptions running rife and reasons are not understood, but merely followed with blind faith.
One such anti-pattern I have come across is the need to mark as many classes as possible as sealed internal...
*RE-Edit: I see marking everything as sealed internal (in C#) as a premature optimisation.*
I am wondering what are some of the other performance anti-patterns people may be aware of or come across?
The biggest performance anti-pattern I have come across is:
Not measuring performance before and
after the changes.
Collecting performance data will show if a certain technique was successful or not. Not doing so will result in pretty useless activities, because someone has the "feeling" of increased performance when nothing at all has changed.
The elephant in the room: Focusing on implementation-level micro-optimization instead of on better algorithms.
Variable re-use.
I used to do this all the time figuring I was saving a few cycles on the declaration and lowering memory footprint. These savings were of minuscule value compared with how unruly it made the code to debug, especially if I ended up moving a code block around and the assumptions about starting values changed.
Premature performance optimizations comes to mind. I tend to avoid performance optimizations at all costs and when I decide I do need them I pass the issue around to my collegues several rounds trying to make sure we put the obfu... eh optimization in the right place.
One that I've run into was throwing hardware at seriously broken code, in an attempt to make it fast enough, sort of the converse of Jeff Atwood's article mentioned in Rulas' comment. I'm not talking about the difference between speeding up a sort that uses a basic, correct algorithm by running it on faster hardware vs. using an optimized algorithm. I'm talking about using a not obviously correct home brewed O(n^3) algorithm when a O(n log n) algorithm is in the standard library. There's also things like hand coding routines because the programmer doesn't know what's in the standard library. That one's very frustrating.
Using design patterns just to have them used.
Using #defines instead of functions to avoid the penalty of a function call.
I've seen code where expansions of defines turned out to generate huge and really slow code. Of course it was impossible to debug as well. Inline functions is the way to do this, but they should be used with care as well.
I've seen code where independent tests has been converted into bits in a word that can be used in a switch statement. Switch can be really fast, but when people turn a series of independent tests into a bitmask and starts writing some 256 optimized special cases they'd better have a very good benchmark proving that this gives a performance gain. It's really a pain from maintenance point of view and treating the different tests independently makes the code much smaller which is also important for performance.
Lack of clear program structure is the biggest code-sin of them all. Convoluted logic that is believed to be fast almost never is.
Do not refactor or optimize while writing your code. It is extremely important not to try to optimize your code before you finish it.
Julian Birch once told me:
"Yes but how many years of running the application does it actually take to make up for the time spent by developers doing it?"
He was referring to the cumulative amount of time saved during each transaction by an optimisation that would take a given amount of time to implement.
Wise words from the old sage... I often think of this advice when considering doing a funky optimisation. You can extend the same notion a little further by considering how much developer time is being spent dealing with the code in its present state versus how much time is saved by the users. You could even weight the time by hourly rate of the developer versus the user if you wanted.
Of course, sometimes its impossible to measure, for example, if an e-commerce application takes 1 second longer to respond you will loose some small % money from users getting bored during that 1 second. To make up that one second you need to implement and maintain optimised code. The optimisation impacts gross profit positively, and net profit negatively, so its much harder to balance. You could try - with good stats.
Exploiting your programming language. Things like using exception handling instead of if/else just because in PLSnakish 1.4 it's faster. Guess what? Chances are it's not faster at all and that two years from now someone maintaining your code will get really angry with you because you obfuscated the code and made it run much slower, because in PLSnakish 1.8 the language maintainers fixed the problem and now if/else is 10 times faster than using exception handling tricks. Work with your programming language and framework!
Changing more than one variable at a time. This drives me absolutely bonkers! How can you determine the impact of a change on a system when more than one thing's been changed?
Related to this, making changes that are not warranted by observations. Why add faster/more CPUs if the process isn't CPU bound?
General solutions.
Just because a given pattern/technology performs better in one circumstance does not mean it does in another.
StringBuilder overuse in .Net is a frequent example of this one.
Once I had a former client call me asking for any advice I had on speeding up their apps.
He seemed to expect me to say things like "check X, then check Y, then check Z", in other words, to provide expert guesses.
I replied that you have to diagnose the problem. My guesses might be wrong less often than someone else's, but they would still be wrong, and therefore disappointing.
I don't think he understood.
Some developers believe a fast-but-incorrect solution is sometimes preferable to a slow-but-correct one. So they will ignore various boundary conditions or situations that "will never happen" or "won't matter" in production.
This is never a good idea. Solutions always need to be "correct".
You may need to adjust your definition of "correct" depending upon the situation. What is important is that you know/define exactly what you want the result to be for any condition, and that the code gives those results.
Michael A Jackson gives two rules for optimizing performance:
Don't do it.
(experts only) Don't do it yet.
If people are worried about performance, tell 'em to make it real - what is good performance and how do you test for it? Then if your code doesn't perform up to their standards, at least it's something the code writer and the application user agree on.
If people are worried about non-performance costs of rewriting ossified code (for example, the time sink) then present your estimates and demonstrate that it can be done in the schedule. Assuming it can.
I believe it is a common myth that super lean code "close to the metal" is more performant than an elegant domain model.
This was apparently de-bunked by the creator/lead developer of DirectX, who re-wrote the c++ version in C# with massive improvements. [source required]
Appending to an array using (for example) push_back() in C++ STL, ~= in D, etc. when you know how big the array is supposed to be ahead of time and can pre-allocate it.
With CPUs being increasingly faster, hard disks spinning, bits flying around so quickly, network speeds increasing as well, it's not that simple to tell bad code from good code like it used to be.
I remember a time when you could optimize a piece of code and undeniably perceive an improvement in performance. Those days are almost over. Instead, I guess we now have a set of rules that we follow like "Don't declare variables inside loops" etc. It's great to adhere to these so that you write good code by default. But how do you know it can't be improved even further without some tool?
Some may argue that a couple of nanoseconds won't really make that big a difference these days. The truth is, we are stuck with so many layers that you get a staggering effect.
I'm not saying we should optimize every little millisecond out of our code as that will be expensive and unfeasible. I believe we have to do our best, given our time constraints, to write efficient code as well.
I'm just interested to know what tools you use to profile and measure performance of code, if at all.
I think that optimization should be thought of not as looking at each line of code, but rather, what asymptotic complexity is your algorithm. For example, using a bubble sort is probably one of the worst sorting algorithms you could use in terms of optimization. It takes the longest. Quicksort and mergesort are faster in terms of sorting, and should be always used before a bubble sort.
If you keep optimization always in your mind when designing a solution to a problem, then you should be able to write readable code, which other developers will approve of. Also, if you are programming in a higher level language that will be compiled before it is run, remember that compilers make some awesome optimizations nowadays that you or I may not think of, and also (more importantly) do not have to worry about.
Stick with a good and low big O(), and it should be optimized pretty good. If you are working with millions or greater in some type of dataset, then look for a big O(logn) algorithm. They work great for large tasks, and keep your code optimized.
Let the compilers work on the line by line code optimizations so you can focus on the solutions.
There are times that do warrant line by line optimizations, and if that is the case that you need that much speed, maybe you might want to look into assembly so that you can control every line that is written.
There's a big difference between "good" code and "fast" code. They aren't exactly separate from each other either, but "fast" code doesn't mean "good". Often times, "fast" actually means bad code because readability compromises must be made to make it fast.
The way I look at it, hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. Unless there is a serious performance problem with some piece of code, you should never have to worry about speed. If there are performance problems, you'll notice them. Only when you notice the performance problem on good hardware should you have to worry about optimization (in my opinion)
If you reach the point where your code is slow, but you can't figure out why, I'd use a profiler like ANT, or dotTrace if you're in the .NET world (I'm sure there are others out there for other platforms & languages). They're pretty useful, but I've only ever had one situation where I needed a profiler to identify the problem. It was something that now that I know the issue, I won't need a profiler again to tell me it's a problem because I'll never forget the amount of time I spent trying to optimize it.
This is absolutely a valid concern, but not for most developers. Most developers are concerned with getting a product that works to their employer. Optimized code is seldom a requirement.
The best way to make sure your code is fast is to benchmark or profile it. A lot of compiler optimizations create non-intuitive oddities in the performance of a programmer's code, so in the end measurement becomes essential.
In my experience, Rational Quantify has given me the best results in terms of code tuning. It is not free, but it is very fully featured and seems to have given me the most useful results.
In terms of free tools, check out gprof or oprofile, if you are on a Unix environment. They are not as good as some of the commercial tools, but can often point you in the right direction.
On a side note, I am almost always surprised at what profilers turn up the first time I use them. You can have intuition as to where code may be bottlenecking, and it can often be completely wrong.
Almost all code I write is plenty fast enough. On the rare occasions when it isn't, for C, C++, and Objective Caml I use the venerable gprof and the excellent valgrind with its superb visualizer kcachegrind (part of the KDE SDK; don't be fooled by the out-of-date code on sourceforge).
The MLton Standard ML compiler and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler both ship with excellent profilers.
I wish there were a better profiler for Lua.
Uh, a profiler maybe? There are ones available for almost all platforms and languages.
Reading this question I found this as (note the quotation marks) "code" to solve the problem (that's perl by the way).
100,{)..3%!'Fizz'*\5%!'Buzz'*+\or}%n*
Obviously this is an intellectual example without real (I hope to never see that in real code in my life) implications but, when you have to make the choice, when do you sacrifice code readability for performance? Do you apply just common sense, do you do it always as a last resort? What are your strategies?
Edit: I'm sorry, seeing the answers I might have expressed the question badly (English is not my native language). I don't mean performance vs readability only after you've written the code, I ask about before you write it as well. Sometimes you can foresee a performance improvement in the future by making some darker design or providing with some properties that will make your class darker. You may decide you will use multiple threads or just a single one because you expect the scalability that such threads may give you, even when that will make the code much more difficult to understand.
My process for situations where I think performance may be an issue:
Make it work.
Make it clear.
Test the performance.
If there are meaningful performance issues: refactor for speed.
Note that this does not apply to higher-level design decisions that are more difficult to change at a later stage.
I always start with the most readable version I can think of. If performance is a problem, I refactor. If the readable version makes it hard to generalize, I refactor.
The key is to have good tests so that refactoring is easy.
I view readability as the #1 most important issue in code, though working correctly is a close second.
Readability is most important. With modern computers, only the most intensive routines of the most demanding applications need to worry too much about performance.
My favorite answer to this question is:
Make it work
Make it right
Make it fast
In the scope of things no one gives a crap about readability except the next unlucky fool that has to take care of your code. However, that being said... if you're serious about your art, and this is an art form, you will always strive to make your code the most per formant it can be while still being readable by others. My friend and mentor (who is a BADASS in every way) once graciously told me on a code-review that "the fool writes code only they can understand, the genius writes code that anyone can understand." I'm not sure where he got that from but it has stuck with me.
Reference
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for
machines to execute. — Abelson & Sussman, SICP
Well written programs are probably easier to profile and hence improve performance.
You should always go for readability first. The shape of a system will typically evolve as you develop it, and the real performance bottlenecks will be unexpected. Only when you have the system running and can see real evidence - as provided by a profiler or other such tool - will the best way to optimise be revealed.
"If you're in a hurry, take the long way round."
agree with all the above, but also:
when you decide that you want to optimize:
Fix algorithmic aspects before syntax (for example don't do lookups in large arrays)
Make sure that you prove that your change really did improve things, measure everything
Comment your optimization so the next guy seeing that function doesn't simplify it back to where you started from
Can you precompute results or move the computation to where it can be done more effectively (like a db)
in effect, keep readability as long as you can - finding the obscure bug in optimized code is much harder and annoying than in the simple obvious code
I apply common sense - this sort of thing is just one of the zillion trade-offs that engineering entails, and has few special characteristics that I can see.
But to be more specific, the overwhelming majority of people doing weird unreadable things in the name of performance are doing them prematurely and without measurement.
Choose readability over performance unless you can prove that you need the performance.
I would say that you should only sacrifice readability for performance if there's a proven performance problem that's significant. Of course "significant" is the catch there, and what's significant and what isn't should be specific to the code you're working on.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Donald Knuth
Readability always wins. Always. Except when it doesn't. And that should be very rarely.
at times when optimization is necessary, i'd rather sacrifice compactness and keep the performance enhancement. perl obviously has some deep waters to plumb in search of the conciseness/performance ratio, but as cute as it is to write one-liners, the person who comes along to maintain your code (who in my experience, is usually myself 6 months later) might prefer something more in the expanded style, as documented here:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/01/16/regexps.html
There are exceptions to the premature optimization rule. For example, when accessing an image in memory, reading a pixel should not be an out-of-line function. And when providing for custom operations on the image, never do it like this:
typedef Pixel PixelModifierFunction(Pixel);
void ModifyAllPixels(PixelModifierFunction);
Instead, let external functions access the pixels in memory, though it's uglier. Otherwise, you are sure to write slow code that you'll have to refactor later anyway, so you're doing extra work.
At least, that's true if you know you're going to deal with large images.