Performance-Aware Programming Series Begins February 1st

In the modern software era, it’s common to have a literal dollar value attached to the speed of the programs you write. If your code runs on a server “in the cloud”, your monthly bill is directly proportional to your software’s performance. The math is simple: the slower your software, the more server time (or servers in general) you have to buy.

Yet despite more economic incentives than ever to write reasonably fast code, software performance has gotten steadily and dramatically worse. A “very slow” program in the 1990s might take two times, five times, or maybe (in the worst offenders) ten times longer to do something than the basic capabilities of the hardware. Today you routinely see software running thousands or even tens of thousands of times slower than it should.

These multiples are not accidents. They stem directly from underlying characteristics of modern hardware, each of which creates an order-of-magnitude decrease in performance when ignored. Ignore them all, and 1000x slower programs are all but a guarantee.

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