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Paul Buchheit: Optimizing everything: some details matter a lot, most don't

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Paul, Obviously, talking about optimization tends to bring up emotion in a lot of people, and adding a language comparison in just adds gasoline to the fire. I think something important to recognize, and something you appear to overlook in your blog, is that optimization in different fields means different things. Specifically, typically in domains where performance (size & space) is truly important (games, HPC, embedded), a lot of the classic truisms don't hold. The most obvious example is the 80/20 rule -- generally performance profiles are much flatter, as the easy things have already been done (or instinctively avoided). See Tim Sweeney's talk (http://programming.reddit.com/info/zshf/comments) for a mention of this. As well, things causing a slow-down are often very difficult to detect (cache misses, excessive synchronization, excessive inlining). Second, waiting until the 'end' to profile & optimize is often too late, for multiple reasons. You may need to change your whole des

Paul Buchheit: Optimizing everything: some details matter a lot, most don't Friday, June 08, 2007 Optimizing everything: some details matter a lot, most don't Optimization is something that all engineers and product designers (all people, really) should understand. However, their words and behavior suggest that most either don't understand it, or haven't really internalized the lessons of optimization. (and by the way, I'm talking about CS-style "make it better" optimization , not "make it optimal" optimization) Like everything, optimization is a complex topic, so I'm going to simplify it into

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