It's nice to see that your government is respectful towards those in need. In the UK, they call it "jobseeker's allowance" - like the type of allowance a parent gives a child.
I'll do some testing this weekend by mounting an SSHFS as my swap partition and removing all but a 256MB RAM module then opening several dozen instances of FireFox. My calculations show that this will have terrible performance but I want to ensure that my software engineering is robust.
Testing your assumptions is something that you're supposed to do when you hit a wall, not when you're driving through a field.
If you've been using computers for long, you should already know VM thrashing can murder a system, to the point of making it unresponsive and needing a reboot. So this is an assumption you have backed by direct experience. And of course, probing it won't tell you anything.
But do you have enough information about how Redis accesses memory under the benchmark in question, combined with the OS page replacement strategy, combined with the characteristics of SSDs, to know the results beforehand? You can guess, for sure; but do you know?
If we all follow your approach, we'll never be surprised unless we get stuck; and if we know what we think we know as well as you seem to think we know it, we shouldn't get stuck in the first place. We should have assumed that we would have gotten stuck, and avoided it.
The article has relatively low value in terms of information content, but the mindset is to be commended. It should have given the author better intuitions about the 3 factors mentioned above. Modern, non-budget systems very seldom thrash; there's a younger generation coming along who've never experienced systems frozen in that way.
I think that there is more to the pool of information than the points you rightly outlined. Other key pieces of data are that Redis is designed to be extremely fast and that it has a strong reliance on the speed of the memory it is operating on. Those facts, coupled with the statistics sniglom mentioned above, very strongly indicate that performance will be terrible.
An analogy I can think of is testing if a stock Ford Fiesta can reach the speed of sound. You know what the engine is capable of, the environment it is operating in and the tires it is running on - you simply don't need to floor the accelerator to come to a conclusion.
That saying about picking ones battles comes to mind. The mindset is certainly of a sharp character, but what good is a knife without a hand to guide it? The map is not the territory but it does save a lot of time if used strategically.
The difference is that SSD backed key value stores are something people are actually interested in (Google LevelDB, Tokyo Cabinet, Twitter fatcache), and Firefox with SSHFS swap partition is not.
There is a tradition of keeping discussions on-topic or at least insightful. Off-the-cuff humourous comments are not really suited for a site like this. There are myraid places where that kind of expression is the norm already. This brings the benefit of increasing the quality of the discussion and results in there being less irrelevant text to sift through.
The comment was no more stupid then the parent comment. Now it is followed by your stupid comment. That the root of that tree has spawned so many stupid comments is a sign of its own stupidity.
They mean that each function does relatively little work, so to render a given web page, the number of function calls (and therefore vtable lookups) is higher than in other browsers. This translates to more overheads and slower execution.
MSVC with PGO will do it, by inserting a guard on the vtable pointer and inlining the most common implementation. But you still take the possible cache miss of reading the vtable pointer, of course. And the other commonly used compilers (clang and gcc) don't do anything like this, even with PGO.
I love SparrowOS's (dead) comments - they're so off the cuff and random. Trying to make sense of them is like doing a really hard crossword puzzle. I have noticed one thing about them, however - when he speaks as himself they make complete sense. E.g.
> I had a problem with discipline. I worked at Ticketmaster while in college, but I know I wouldn't have studied more, just knowing my personal psychology.
> If you love programming more than anything, you are probably the kind of person who wants to know assembly language. If your full heart is not into programming, maybe not.
> I wrote my own compiler. Doesn't use REGs to pass values to functions.
They only become incomprehensible when he is relaying, as he puts it, what God says. E.g.
It seems almost like his thinking is split into two modes - one rational and the other a stream of consciousness. The first makes sense to the rest of us since there are commonalities which we can relate to (i.e. logic) but the second must contain a great deal of personal references which only he can understand the meaning of. "God's words" are his feelings put into text in a completely unfiltered way.
I second this. I've been working out of hours a lot recently and find that my productivity is boosted dramatically when I am alone. Open plan offices need to go the way of the dinosaur.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they have swindled over a million USD for a glue gun which you can assemble at home in 20 minutes. Sure, people can spend their money on whatever they want but it doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
You're making the assumption that everyone in the world is capable of or would even want to assemble a crude version of the same concept at home. Comparing the resourcefulness or ingenuity of an experienced hacker to that of the product's target market (artists, crafters and children) is asinine at best.
It is exactly this kind of overreaction that I was addressing in my original comment. You make these wild assumptions that it's only going to cost them pennies per unit to manufacture and that they're ripping people off. But that's far from reality.
Unless you lie and tell them that it's something other than a sheet of A4 paper, no, you haven't swindled them. You sold a sheet of A4 paper at the price that someone was willing to pay.
It's nice to see that your government is respectful towards those in need. In the UK, they call it "jobseeker's allowance" - like the type of allowance a parent gives a child.