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Asked: 2026-05-11T01:28:03+00:00

With CPUs being increasingly faster, hard disks spinning, bits flying around so quickly, network

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With CPUs being increasingly faster, hard disks spinning, bits flying around so quickly, network speeds increasing as well, it’s not that simple to tell bad code from good code like it used to be.

I remember a time when you could optimize a piece of code and undeniably perceive an improvement in performance. Those days are almost over. Instead, I guess we now have a set of rules that we follow like ‘Don’t declare variables inside loops’ etc. It’s great to adhere to these so that you write good code by default. But how do you know it can’t be improved even further without some tool?

Some may argue that a couple of nanoseconds won’t really make that big a difference these days. The truth is, we are stuck with so many layers that you get a staggering effect.

I’m not saying we should optimize every little millisecond out of our code as that will be expensive and unfeasible. I believe we have to do our best, given our time constraints, to write efficient code as well.

I’m just interested to know what tools you use to profile and measure performance of code, if at all.

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1 Answer

  1. There’s a big difference between ‘good’ code and ‘fast’ code. They aren’t exactly separate from each other either, but ‘fast’ code doesn’t mean ‘good’. Often times, ‘fast’ actually means bad code because readability compromises must be made to make it fast.

    The way I look at it, hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. Unless there is a serious performance problem with some piece of code, you should never have to worry about speed. If there are performance problems, you’ll notice them. Only when you notice the performance problem on good hardware should you have to worry about optimization (in my opinion)

    If you reach the point where your code is slow, but you can’t figure out why, I’d use a profiler like ANT, or dotTrace if you’re in the .NET world (I’m sure there are others out there for other platforms & languages). They’re pretty useful, but I’ve only ever had one situation where I needed a profiler to identify the problem. It was something that now that I know the issue, I won’t need a profiler again to tell me it’s a problem because I’ll never forget the amount of time I spent trying to optimize it.

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