This is the text of a speech I originally wrote for the International Speech Competition at my Toastmasters club in April 2012. (I won the club competition and came second in the area competition a week or so later.)
In July I gave a slightly modified version, reproduced here, as a 5 minute Lightning Talk at OSCON in Portland OR. Continue reading
I’ve had a great week at OSCON. The talks are excellent but the real value is in the relationships formed and renewed in the “hallway track”. I’m honoured and humbled to be able to call many great people my friends.
My talk on Devel::NYTProf seemed to go well. This year I covered not just NYTProf and the new features in v3 (not yet released) but also added a section on how to use NYTProf to optimize your perl code.
Here’s a quick summary, with links to the slides and screen-cast, and outline what’s still to be done before v3 gets released (getting closer by the day). Continue reading
At OSCON this year1 I’m giving a “State-of-the-art Profiling with Devel::NYTProf” talk. It’ll be an update of the one I gave last year, including coverage of new features added since then (including, hopefully, two significant new features that are in development).
This year I’d like to spend some time talking about how interpret the raw information and using it to guide code changes. Approaches like common sub-expression elimination and moving invariant code out of loops are straight-forward. They’re ‘low hanging fruit’ with no API changes involved. Good for a first-pass through the code.
Moving loops down into lower-level code is an example of a deeper change I’ve found useful. There are many more. I’d like to collect them to add to the talk and the NYTProf documentation.
So here’s a question for you: after looking at the NYTProf report, how did you identify what you needed to do to fix the problems?
I’m interested in your experiences. How you used NYTProf, how you interpreted the raw information NYTProf presented, and then, critically, how you decided what code changes to make to improve performance. What worked, what didn’t. The practice, not the theory.
Could you to take a moment to think back over the times you’ve used NYTProf, the testing strategy you’ve used, and the code changes you’ve made as a result? Ideally go back and review the diffs and commit comments.
Then send me an email — tell me your story!
The more detail the better! Ideally with actual code (or pseudo-code) snippets2.
Not this... 