Post #214,505
7/12/05 4:02:16 PM
|
Odd word usage
If someone is describing a system that gets slower as you add data, and says he does not like the way it is degrading linearly, he wants it to degrade logarithmically, what does he mean?
|
Post #214,507
7/12/05 4:08:53 PM
|
Wants the rate to be slower at first
Hopefully it will complete before it hits the fast part of the curve.
|
Post #214,508
7/12/05 4:12:23 PM
|
That performance should be inversely proportional not to...
...load, but to the logarithm of load? Seems like the only plausible interpretation, to me.
[link|mailto:MyUserId@MyISP.CountryCode|Christian R. Conrad]
(I live in Finland, and my e-mail in-box is at the Saunalahti company.)
Your lies are of Microsoftian Scale and boring to boot. Your 'depression' may be the closest you ever come to recognizing truth: you have no 'inferiority complex', you are inferior - and something inside you recognizes this. - [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=71575|Ashton Brown]
|
Post #214,510
7/12/05 4:18:41 PM
|
Huh?
On both.
Let me rephrase.
I've been told the guy is a "smock", ie: he doesn't even rate stuffed shirt.
With that background, does what he said make more or less sense?
|
Post #214,514
7/12/05 4:31:35 PM
|
Ok, given that
What he's saying doesn't make sense seeing what you do.
If you had to parse info from a lot of entries, packets, wotnot, and it's going to quit or reset in a short time, you would want it run like a bandit initially and slow down closer to the limit. For what you do, I don't know why he would want something that would bog hugely toward the predictable end of run.
I just made my best guess based on the (semi)technical marketing eng types I deal with occasionally. Your idiots are likely different from my idiots.
|
Post #214,720
7/14/05 9:41:37 AM
|
ICLRPD (new thread)
Created as new thread #214719 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=214719|ICLRPD]
jb4
shrub\ufffdbish (Am., from shrub + rubbish, after the derisive name for America's 43 president; 2003) n. 1. a form of nonsensical political doubletalk wherein the speaker attempts to defend the indefensible by lying, obfuscation, or otherwise misstating the facts; GIBBERISH. 2. any of a collection of utterances from America's putative 43rd president. cf. BULLSHIT
|
Post #214,521
7/12/05 5:18:49 PM
|
If he was slightly technical I'd say...
that he wants you to do a binary lookup or equivalent (hash, BTree, etc) rather than scan a list.
You get a linear degradation in performance when you linearly scan a list, if the list has twice as many things it takes on average twice as long to do a lookup. You get a logarithmic degradation when you do a binary lookup.
That is he wants lookup time to scale like O(log(n)) rather than O(n).
Of course he may well completely misunderstand the performance characteristics of your system and why it looks like it does.
If he isn't technical, I'd guess that he is just repeating a magical invocation that someone else said, and he hopes it will make you do something useful.
Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
|
Post #214,536
7/12/05 6:31:31 PM
|
Got it.
No, this stuff is not based on lookups of items in that fashion.
Doesn't really matter, since he's a MS SQL/Server bigot who pretends to know large data, but it's not my problem anymore since I'm not in that group.
He's taking pot shots at a system I wrote 5 years ago, that other people have been maintaining and extending the whole time.
|
Post #214,575
7/13/05 12:51:19 AM
|
You'd be fools not to consider ...
... the boolean anti-binary, least squares approach!
--
Chris Altmann
|
Post #214,629
7/13/05 12:18:00 PM
|
Linear degradation is usually an improvement
given the average programmer's propensity to code up bubble sorts.
Anyhow, performance is typically bounded by the quality of your database and the level of optimization effort you are willing to put into your queries. I mean, if you're going to update 1000 records, that's just gonna take twice as long as updating 500 now, isn't it.
"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein
"This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
|
