[sldev] getting serious about software.

[Alan Grimes]

I am becoming increasingly distressed about all this focus on chip-level
optimizations. At best we're talking about a speedup of around 1.3.
Auditing the code would probably close 2/3rds the open bug reports and
yield a speedup between 5 and 10 times.

Here are a few articles. of interest:

http://www.eros-os.org/essays/reliability/paper.html

The lesson I take from Eros is that to make a piece of software FAST,
you first put all your effort into making it verifiably reliable and
removing every stray and redundant line of code you can find.

Next, Examine how your app interacts with the libraries on your system,
are you using the right libraries? are you taking full advantage of the
library's features?

Once you've done that, go to the manufacturer's performance manuals:

http://developer.amd.com/devguides.jsp

These manuals tell you how best to use the language and the compiler to
generate more efficient binaries before writing off any CPUs.

next, you identify the most performance critical modules and generate
dynamic libraries compiled for each of the major architectures.

Finally, if you still need more that your compiler can't give you, you
write assembly language kernels for the stuff that absolutely positively
needs to be screaming fast and the code the compiler makes blows donky
chunks.

-- 
Opera: Sing it loud! :o(  )>-<