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Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.

Comments
  • 63
    I love that diagram. It perfectly encapsulates why quibbling about language/framework "speed" is 99% pointless wankery.
  • 16
    That is some well deserved ++ right there.
  • 9
    @fuckfuckityfuck But Assembler? It's really fast, we should use that ;)
  • 12
    @fuckfuckityfuck wankery.. *giggles like a school girl*
    Any other masterpieces you have to share?
  • 8
    @Elkstorm nah, pure opcodes are better.
  • 16
    Did you show the diagram with the sarcastic comment on it? devRant should have a ++++ function for stories like yours;)
  • 11
    If you showed this actual pic I'll consider getting a second account just to ++ it again:)
  • 18
    @Lukas No, just the before->after numbers. Dev ended up having to yank out his own parallel library. It didn't play well under IIS, which he blamed the errors on how Microsoft/IIS handles threads. The 'my code would work if Microsoft knew what they were doing' excuse.
  • 14
    @KeyWeeUsr it's 2016, you should really be coding in binary now.
  • 10
    @squanto or... I'll just be switching the current in cpu manually, magically. :D
  • 4
    @PaperTrail why on earth would you write your own parallel library (who cares that much?).

    To me that actually smacks of being too lazy to read up on (or it understanding) the .NET parallelism stuff.
  • 2
    By "you" I mean the other dude
  • 3
    a parallel pie chart
  • 6
    @chrizzle He read and completely understood the documentation. His knowledge of the .Net stack might even impress Mr. Skeet. I suspect it boils down to writing software for users is 'beneath' him and any...I mean any excuse to do something else (writing a parallel library, writing his own version of nuget, etc) he will. The "Can't create that WPF app..gotta write my own string class library first" type. He brings donuts to the office from time to time, so it's not all bad. :)
  • 5
    Yeah but using a pie chart for this kind of obfuscates the data in your favor... if the reduction in speed was so tiny you should have made a bar chart, like a man!
  • 0
    @JoseHdez2

    if you want to learn about charts here's a good book from the designer jan white.

    http://archive.org/download/...
  • 0
    Have fun with your stressball!
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