Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
At 02:00 PM 10/04/01 +0100, Christian Nentwich wrote: > Of course loading binary files is >faster than parsing huge text files, anyone who's been in this field for >any time will tell you that, without needing empirical evidence. Er, just one data point, but I've been in this field since 1981 and have written a *lot* of software and have a special focus on optimization. In my experience, assertions about what will make software run faster, when not backed up by empirical profiling data, are not worth wasting time on. I have seen untold amounts of time wasted by overeager junior programmers who just knew, "without needing empirical evidence", that putting a hash-table in, or some such, would make their app go faster, when some profiling work would have shown that their performance was dominated by I/O buffer management. So, Sean may have used strong language, but in point of fact he was correct, so it's forgivable. Get some data on how much space and time a binary representation will save, then you'll be able to make intelligent quantitative decisions on where it's worthwhile deploying it. Until then, it's just amusing speculation. -Tim
|
