Performance Saves Lives - States Grizzled Guru Programmer J. Michael Fastcode

From our objective reporter, Mark Collins-Cope
11 August 2002, 14:22 GMT

"I still can't get it across to some people," said J. Michael as I interviewed him. "These people flat refuse to spend hours and hours optimising code that is run once every four years on average. They just don't get it!"

J. Michael is an unusual character. Asked about what he does in his spare time, J. Michael said: "mostly I spend my time with a calculator, double checking my bank and visa statements. Last year, I only spent about 200 hours on this, and I managed to get the bastards at the bank to refund 36 whole pence to me. Yes, hard to believe isn't it, thirty-six pence they had overcharged me. If I hadn't been so diligent they'd probably be drinking my money in a city wine bar by now."

"My other great passion," he stated, "is moving money between visa accounts."

Why would you want to do that, I asked him.

"Well," he said, "not a lot of people know this, but when you open a new account you can often get 1-2 % off the interest rate!" He laughed to himself at this... "It can take a while to work out," he said, "but I've now optimised my inter-account visa transfer process to deal with my 126 visa accounts. I'm working on a spreadsheet to do the calculations for me and I estimate," he said wide-eyed, "that by the end of this year I'll have spent only 122 hours on this, and I'll have saved nearly £5 (UKP 5) using this approach."

"Isn't that a little low?" I asked him, "you know, given the 1-2% you can save by transferring money between accounts?"

"What you have to understand," he replied to me in his sage-like manner, "is that I don't believe in borrowing money really. I occassionally have to buy something by credit card, but this is not by my own choice. Sometimes - like over the phone - it's the only way to pay."

Having complemented him on his financial acumen, we returned to the ever interesting subject of code optimisation.

"It's important to optimise all loops, variables, etc. and avoid the overhead of method calls if at all possible. And the more time spent procrastinating over doing this, the more CPU time is being wasted. That's why I always tell my team of programmers: optimise early, optimise now!"

"Don't you realise," he added, "that if all the time wasted on function calls in the world was added together, it'd be the equivalent of 2 years usage of a Cray supercomputer. Just think what the Cancer Research Fund could do with that time. That's what gets me really angry... when I think of all those people dying because of sloppy programming..."

He certainly has a point there.

My new motto: "Wasted CPU Cycles Cost Lives."

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