The Performance of Open Source Applications

In 1974, Donald Knuth wrote, “We should forget about small efficiencies, let’s say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” With computers available today being millions of times faster than computers available today, programmers today have even less reason to worry about scraping cycles and saving bytes than in previous generations. But “less” is not “nothing”: sometimes, extracting the last bit of performance from a machine really matters.

This book is written by over a dozen developers who have struggled with slow code, memory leaks, or uncontrollable lags in open source software. They share their mistakes and successes and give the reader an overview of how they are facing their particular challenges. With examples ranging from bioinformatics research code to web browsing, the solutions are as varied as the problems.

This book will help junior and senior developers understand how their colleagues think about performance.

The Performance of Open Source Applications PDF

Author(s): Tavish Armstrong

Publisher: lulu.com, Year: 2013

ISBN: 1304488780,9781304488787