> Yeah sure, I didn't mean to hijack the thread. The segfaults are 
> obviously more important than the slownesses. I think your proposal is 
> more likely to succeed if we don't get sidetracked :-)

So let's open up a new thread then.

To summarize: We need something to test speed regressions. Problems we face 
are at least:
- we need tests
- we can only compare against previous results on the same machine
- we need to deal with some uncertainness of the results (e.g. through system 
load)
- we need code to run the tests and compare with previous results

These are just some random thoughts to get the thread rolling.

The original message by David was:
> 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.

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]


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