Performance, Love & Hate

If you thought that by looking really closely at your mortgage deal for a few days, you could find a way to reduce your payments by 90%, I think that'd be a pretty exciting prospect.

If you knew that with a bit of time and effort, you could make your car run on ten times less petrol, or get it to move ten times faster, that'd be worth doing.

If took the books you write, or the songs you produce, or the paintings or the whatever, and found a way to be ten times more productive - at the same quality - it'd be enormously artistically rewarding.

This, ladies and gentlebens, is the reason that as a geek, I find performance-tuning about the most exciting part of the art. It's actually possible. Look at a system closely enough, think clearly enough, and you can often find a way to make things run an order of magnitude faster, at no extra cost. I'm not talking the dumb route of "Buy a faster machine". Any idiot can suggest that, and it's usually not half as spectacular as you hope. I'm talking the same system, 10 times more efficient. I'm talking ingenuity. And when you nail it, it's about the most fucking satisfying thing there is.

But if you reduced your mortgage by 90%, you'd be called a financial genius. At least by your partner. If your car ran ten times longer or ten times faster, you'd be hailed as the engineer of our age. And even if your art wasn't the best in the world, you would at least be go down in history as one of the most prolific creators of our time.

But you make a computer system run ten times faster, or even a hundred times after a particularly fine think, and sometimes the best you get is that people stop complaining. Somebody will say something along the lines of, "About time. Why wasn't it this fast in the first place? Are you lazy? I would have typed FAST ages ago."

And that's why performance-tuning is the least fucking satisfying thing there is.