Got myself a few months ago into the optimization rabbit hole as I had a slow quant finance library to take care of, and for now my most successful optimizations are using local memory allocators (see my C++ post, I also played with mimalloc which helped but custom local memory allocators are even better) and rethinking class layouts in a more “data-oriented” way (mostly going from array-of-structs to struct-of-arrays layouts whenever it’s more advantageous to do so, see for example this talk).
What are some of your preferred optimizations that yielded sizeable gains in speed and/or memory usage? I realize that many optimizations aren’t necessarily specific to any given language so I’m asking in [email protected].
The optimization I’m the most proud about was when I worked on a legacy project whose end-to-end builds took around 1 hour. After spending some time working on its architecture, project layout and build system, I managed to get the full end-to-end builds to take 10 minutes, and incremental builds to be almost instant.
What makes me the most proud about this project is that the technical debt plaguing the legacy project was directly and indirectly the reason why half a dozen of my team members burned out and quit the company. After that point my remaining team members started to be far less stressed and team velocity skyrocketed, just for the fact that the thought of iterating over a bugfix and posting a pull request didn’t cost at least one hour, and sometimes two or three.
Surely you got a bonus and a raise out of it right? Right??
Who am I kidding only managers get such things
The only reward I got from it was recognition from my team members, which was already more than what I was expecting to get.
My manager was praised for the higher team velocity and improvements in the team’s burndown chart. The hallmark of having done good work is seeing others trying to take credit for it.