From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-04-19T23:37:23+09:00
Subject: Re: effective profiling

Giles Bowkett wrote:
> I have a friend who's run into some profiling problems. He set up a
> profiler on a Rails app, maybe the default benchmarking stuff Rails
> comes with, I'm not sure. Unit tests run 60s normally, and come in at
> an hour and a half with the profiler going.
>
> That sounds pretty extreme to me. What's the best way to profile a big
> app in Ruby? They've got a lot of recursive cloning going on, I think
> that's probably the issue, but how do they find out for sure?
>
Perhaps premature optimization isn't so bad after all. :) Seriously, 
though, profiling is a form of testing, and if you're going to do 
test-driven development but *not*  performance testing, you're finding 
only *some* of the bugs. So the best way to profile a big application, 
assuming a total absence of software performance engineering during its 
construction, would be to break it up into smaller pieces in top-down 
fashion.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.net/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.