Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling · HackerPapers discussions

Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling — mentioned by sitkack

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 03:59:52 GMT

If you enjoy the science of injecting slowness to determine which component has the largest impact on performance, you would enjoy this work by Emery Berger. Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03676 "Performance (Really) Matters" with Emery Berger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g1Acy5eGbE

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling — mentioned by moonchild

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 22:19:09 GMT

> deleting this one line of code can have a dramatic effect on seemingly unrelated performance micro-benchmarks. Some numbers get better (e.g. +5%), some numbers get worse (e.g. -10%). The same micro-benchmark can get faster on one C compiler but slower on another There's a fundamental disconnect that makes it difficult for humans to reason about performance in computer programs. Because the speed of light is so slow, computer architecture as we know it will always rely on cache and OoO to be fast. The human brain does seem to work out of order, but it's only used to thinking about a world…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling — mentioned by vlovich123

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 16:15:22 GMT

There's also something to be said for building better tooling in this area. Not everyone can achieve expertise in everything. Better tooling helps level the playing feel (& eventually outperform experts when the tooling becomes indispensable). You may think that's a cop-out, but consider something like coz[1]. Sqlite is managed and maintained by experts. There's significant capital behind investing engineering effort. However, better tooling still managed to locate 25% of performance improvement[2] & even 9% in memcached. Even experts have their limits & of course these tools require…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.