[thanksforfish]

> To be fair, if the rest of your pipeline runs in the megabytes per second, then memory allocation might as well be free from a speed point of view.

This is important, but I think sometime people struggle with this sort of thinking. I struggled to explain a similar concept to a junior engineer recently. He was very keen to try to optimize part of a process that wasn't the bottleneck. I tried a couple approaches, like benchmarking various parts under different conditions, modeling it to calculate how speeding up different components would take.

I wasn't convincing, unfortunately, so he implemented some changes that sussessfully sped up one part but didn't improve end to end performance. I think sometimes you need to see it with your own eyes.

[kragen]

At my first job I spent about US$10k on a super fast compile server which didn't speed up our slow compiles because the bottleneck was the shared 10BaseT Ethernet to the NFS fileserver where we were storing both the source code and the build artifacts. I should have listened to my boss who was telling me it probably wouldn't help.