Montezuma Heat Death

I decided to spend a little time optimizing Montezuma indexing for speed, with the hope that I could get it to index the Planet Lisp archives within a reasonable amount of time.

Indexing 1000 pastes took about 100 seconds, as I mentioned the other day. Avoiding 6 million garbage-generating calls to subseq saved 10 seconds. Cutting down on the number of calls to string< and string> saved 4 seconds. Each was a significant speedup, but nothing dramatic.

After doing some of this benchmarking, the laptop I was using overheated and shut down. Since this time there were no cats lying on top and therefore no obvious scapegoats, I thought maybe the vents had just gotten clogged and so I blasted the hell out of it with canned air.

The comprehensive air blast cleaning cut 45 seconds off the benchmark time. It was like getting a processor upgrade.

Posted by jjwiseman at May 26, 2006 02:36 PM

