henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/16/89)
Something that occurred to me at Usenix: if there are any ambitious souls out there looking for something useful to do that might lead to a Usenix paper, take some significant piece of Unix and improve its performance. Most of the Unix code has never even been looked at with performance in mind. The authors by and large followed the (sensible) philosophy of "first make it work, then make it fast"... except that in practice this usually turned into "first make it work, then lose interest and go do something else". -- The Earth is our mother; | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology our nine months are up. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
ntm1063@dsacg1.UUCP (James Haskins) (02/16/89)
From article <1989Feb15.194802.15252@utzoo.uucp>, by henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer): Stuff deleted....> mind. The authors by and large followed the (sensible) philosophy of > "first make it work, then make it fast"... except that in practice this > usually turned into "first make it work, then lose interest and go do > something else". > -- > The Earth is our mother; | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology > our nine months are up. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu One of the points that Software Performance Engineering tries to make is that performance must be designed in from the beginning. Adding it later usually doesn't work, for reasons such as you stated. I haven't attended USENIX (that is reserved for my best UNIX guy), but I do attend the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) International Conferences and there has been an ongoing thread of papers, panel discussions, and BOFs on the problems of performance engineering. Something along the lines you have suggested would be interesting, particularly in regard to the problems encountered when trying to tune after the fact. If anyone is interested, some discussion along the lines of these problems (in the comp.software-eng group?) would be nice. -- Jim Haskins DLA Systems Automation Center | 614 238-9432 DSAC-TMP P.O. Box 1605 Columbus, Ohio 43216 | Autovon 850- All opinions expressed are mine alone etc., etc.