Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!

Subject: Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!
From: "Mark Graybill" <saundby@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 17:01:06 -0700
Build engineer is I think what the official title is, but release management
is part of the deal.

-Mark G.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <tower@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!


>
> Does this mean your wife is a release engineer?
>
> </Chad>
>
>
>
>
>                       "Mark Graybill"
>                       <saundby@foothil         To:
<stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>                       l.net>                   cc:
>                       Sent by:                 Subject: Re: [stella] A
warning to newbies -- every
>                       owner-stella@big         cycle becomes sacred!
>                       list.com
>
>
>                       05/06/03 04:45
>                       PM
>                       Please respond
>                       to stella
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Matthew Ozor <matt@xxxxxxxx>
> To: <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 7:30 AM
> Subject: Re: [stella] A warning to newbies -- every cycle becomes sacred!
>
>
> > Visual Basic is for writing programs faster not writing fast programs.
> > Worrying about cycles in 2 GHZ machines is unnecessary.
>
> Usually, yes, but that's not entirely true. It's possible to squander any
> amount of computing resources, since the resources are always finite but
> the
> ability to squander them has no known limit.
>
> As a case in point, there is the computing environment my wife supports.
> They do builds of a software product on a high end multiprocessor system
> with a number of other systems supporting it. It was taking about 12 hours
> to do a build on these systems before they decided to do an upgrade. They
> need to be able to do about 3 builds a day. The upgrade increased
processor
> speed and the number of processors to result in about a doubling of the
> available CPU cycles, while also increasing the available RAM by about
50%.
> They were shocked when the upgrade only resulted in the builds being
> reduced
> to about 10 hours each.
>
> After the upgrade debacle they finally allowed my wife to start
> implementing
> some of a laundry list of fixes she had recommended they do before
spending
> money on more hardware. She implemented the fixes more or less in her
spare
> time around the other work she does on the systems, and also put together
> another server out of old cast-off equipment to test her fixes. The test
> hardware has less than 1/10th the CPU cycles, and less than 1/2 the RAM of
> the production hardware. The build now takes about 6-8 hours on the test
> hardware, and just over 3 hours on the production hardware.
>
> The software they use to run builds is all written in Unix shell script,
> awk, perl, and other RAD languages. One of their biggest problems was
> profligate abuse of the Unix 'find' command (any use of which borders on
> abuse, IMO.)
>
> So I say go on counting cycles and thinking about optimizations, even in
> VB.
> There are places in code where you can optimize the heck out of it and it
> won't make a bit of difference. But there are also places in code where
> only
> trimming a few parts of a percent off the time can pay off big time.
> Working
> in a constrained enviroment like the 2600 is great training for learning
> rules of optimization that are applicable at any level.
>
> -Mark G.
>
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