On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 05:26:53PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
- Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance
analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead. In an inkscape-tester group such work could be conducted without directly irritating developers.
No reference is given to the conversation in question, but I'd guess that the "chastiser" was emphasizing the importance of algorithm choice when trying to improve performance: this is standard advice (second to to "use a profiler before touching the code"), and is mentioned in the comp.lang.c FAQ answer on performance tuning (http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/q20.13.html).
Another fairly well-known source (Knuth, perhaps?) says that the first rule of optimization is "don't do it"; I think because of the cost in readability, bugginess, developer time, and the fact that most code isn't performance-critical (80% of program time being spent in 10% of the code, or whatever percentages). (I think the second & third rules, from the same source, are "use a profiler first" and "optimize algorithms rather than code".)
Testing for performance regressions would certainly be valuable.
pjrm.