My wife was working on a project where in some cases it was taking several minutes for a web page to appear. The project is pretty complicated and involves many pieces. I remembered that I had a book which talked about performance tuning so I pulled down my copy of Programming Pearls from the bookshelf. While it’s more geared towards writing code than integrating pieces together (which is closer to her project), the methodology still applies. Most of what I was able to cite from the book ends up sounding like common sense but is a good reminder: if you need a small speedup, consider all the levels and work at the one which will give the most gain for the least effort; if you need a large speedup, work at many levels since in some cases those speedups can multiply.

I did a little research so I could write this post about the book and to my surprise, a second edition has been released. While I haven’t had a chance to take a look at the new edition, I’m definitely going to seek it out. Although it doesn’t appear in the actual book, Jon posted a section from a draft preface which explains why he wrote the second edition; from that you can get a feel for his style.

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