From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 15 14:38:05 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E886537B401; Thu, 15 May 2003 14:38:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (critter.freebsd.dk [212.242.86.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F229E43FA3; Thu, 15 May 2003 14:38:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from phk@phk.freebsd.dk) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by critter.freebsd.dk (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h4FLc2xm003642; Thu, 15 May 2003 23:38:03 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from phk@phk.freebsd.dk) To: Narvi From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 16 May 2003 00:26:19 +0300." <20030516002105.K40030-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 23:38:02 +0200 Message-ID: <3641.1053034682@critter.freebsd.dk> cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org cc: Marcel Moolenaar Subject: Re: Optimizations. X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:38:06 -0000 In message <20030516002105.K40030-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee>, Narvi writes: >On Thu, 15 May 2003, Marcel Moolenaar wrote: >> On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 02:30:33PM +0200, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote: >> > Maybe is time to think about some 'optimiztion team' creation? >> I think I don't want to see this happen based on professional >> experience. >Well, supposedly any such team would need to start by creating a set of >tools and benchmarks [...] If I have to be honest, I think this is the wrong way to approach the subject, if on no other ground than on the 3. rule of optimizations ("Don't do it yet"). While it would be nice to have a set of "blessed benchmarks" canned and ready to run, we should learn from the lmbench fiasco in Linux that such benchmarks can easier mislead than lead. My personal professional experience with optimizations or "Performance management" as it was called, is that you want some very rigid _functional_ testcases, which must pass at any one time so you don't unnoticed loose functionality to optimizations. We also know that the main performance issue is Giant, Giant and Giant. So I really think the band of merry men we are talking about, if they can be interested, would do much more good if they would start out building functional and regression tests for our most critical facilities. I can't speak for the other heavy-duty guys in the project, but I would personally be _really_ _REALLY_ grateful if I could "cd /usr/src ; make test" and know that a significant fraction of our functionality worked if it returned a zero exit code. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.