On Friday 10 August 2007, David Harvey wrote: > Strongly agree. > > I'd like to add something. I consider "slowness" a bug. When SAGE does > something obviously way too slowly, that's almost as bad as a genuine > bug. Some slownesses are easy to fix, some are not. > > One of the things that really worries me is that someone who doesn't > know the code really intimately, can change something in a way that > they think improves the code, but that has a dramatic negative effect > on performance in apparently unrelated areas. A common culprit is > adding "type-checking" to the beginning of a low-level function. We > currently don't have any systematic way of even *noticing* these kinds > of things. > > It would be great if we had some coherent way of managing this. The > first thing that occurs to me is some kind of "docprofile" (like > doctests, but for checking speed of operations). If this works, it > might be a good way of spotting "speed regressions". This is probably > quite hard to set up.... for lots of reasons.... but I'm wondering > whether people think something like this is feasible. > > david
I agree that at least bug reports should be filled for things SAGE does slowly. I'd like to have a docprofile test, but it seems hard to get right because you'll have to take some fuzziness into account (e.g. the cputime might vary depending on the system load). Also, you cannot test against some expected value in your documentation but only against prior versions of SAGE on your own hardware. Also, all prior attempts to get some reproducible, reliable benchmarks for SAGE with a broad coverage failed. All in all it seems hard but necessary. Martin -- name: Martin Albrecht _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb _jab: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
