- From: Michal Young <young@cs.purdue.edu>
- Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 11:58:25 -0500
- To: Kim.Lo@amgen.com, Multiple recipients of list <www-html@www10.w3.org>
>Second, with regards to CGI, do you know what is the difference in >performance when writting perl script or C code? (Give me a percentage >estimate) A common mistake in choosing what/whether to optimize is to consider the speedup obtainable in a portion of the task under consideration, without adequate analysis of the contribution of that portion to the whole task. You need to ask: What portion of the total latency in sending a request, processing it, and receiving a reply is spent executing a Perl script, and how much faster would it be if the script were a binary executable? For some tasks, the execution time will be significant, and optimizing it will be a sensible step. For most tasks it wouldn't matter even if the C code ran 1000 times faster than the Perl code. There is no substitute for actual measurements of the behavior of a particular application. The telescope builder's rule is also applicable here: It's faster to build a 3" lens and then a 5" lens, than to build a 5" lens. -Michal ---------------------- Michal Young Purdue University Software Engineering Research Center Department of Computer Sciences 1398 Computer Science Building West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398 voice: 317-494-6023 fax: 317-494-0739 URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/young -----------------------
Received on Saturday, 25 March 1995 11:56:35 UTC