I'm currently working with extremely large fixed width files, sometimes well over a million lines. I have written a method that can write over the files based on a set of parameters, but I think there has to be a more efficient way to accomplish this. The current code I'm using is: def self.writefiles(file_name, positions, update_valu...
Our computer science teacher once said that for some reason it is more efficient to count down that count up. For example if you need to use a FOR loop and the loop index is not used somewhere (like printing a line of N * to the screen) I mean that code like this : for (i=N; i>=0; i--) putchar('*'); is better than: for (i=0; i<...
I am taking an assembly course now, and the guy who checks our home assignments is a very pedantic old-school optimization freak. For example he deducts 10% if he sees: mov ax, 0 instead of: xor ax,ax even if it's only used once. I am not a complete beginner in assembly programing but I'm not an optimization expert, so I need yo...
I just set a conditional breakpoint in Eclipse's debugger with a mildly inefficient condition by breakpoint standards - checking whether a HashMap's value list (8 elements) contains Double.NaN. This resulted in an extremely noticeable slowdown in performance - after about five minutes, I gave up. Then I copy pasted the condition into an...
I find myself often with a situation where I need to perform an operation on a set of properties. The operation can be anything from checking if a particular property matches anything in the set to a single iteration of actions. Sometimes the set is dynamically generated when the function is called, some built with a simple LINQ statemen...
I'm designing a News Feed system using PHP/MySQL similar to facebook's. I have asked a similar question before but now I've changed the design and I'm looking for feedback. Example News: User_A commented on User_B's new album. "Hey man nice pictures!" User_B added a new Photo to [his/her] profile. [show photo thu...
I rather enjoy adding practical eye-candy to the networking community I've been developing but as things start to stack up I worry about load times. Is it truly faster to have users load (a hopefully cached) copy of jquery from Google's repositories? Does using jQuery for AJAX calls improve/reduce efficiency over basic javascript xmlHT...
I have a table named Projects that has the following relationships: has many Contributions has many Payments In my result set, I need the following aggregate values: Number of unique contributors (DonorID on the Contribution table) Total contributed (SUM of Amount on Contribution table) Total paid (SUM of PaymentAmount on Payment tab...
I'm doing some indexing and memory is sufficient but CPU isn't. So I have one huge dictionary and then a smaller dictionary I'm merging into the bigger one: big_dict = {"the" : {"1" : 1, "2" : 1, "3" : 1, "4" : 1, "5" : 1}} smaller_dict = {"the" : {"6" : 1, "7" : 1}} #after merging resulting_dict = {"the" : {"1" : 1, "2" : 1, "3" : 1, "...
I am wondering if a typical while(true) ServerSocket listen loop takes an entire core to wait and accept a client connection (Even when implementing runnable and using Thread .start()) I am implementing a type of distributed computing cluster and each computer needs every core it has for computation. A Master node needs to communicate w...
After hunting and pecking for about 35 years, I have decided to learn to type. I am learning QWERTY and have learned about 2/3 of the letters so far. While learning, I have noticed how asymmeterical the keyboard is, which really bothers me. (I will probably switch to a symmetrical keyboard eventually, but for now am trying to do everythi...
It seems that none of these solutions eliminate the lag associated with rendering images onto the screen (whether from .png's or using CG). There is a 28x16 grid of blocks that are each 16x16 pixels, and at some points in the game, about half of them need to change their image because of a state change. Having each block as a subview of...
Hi, What I wish to achieve is - log all information about each and every visit to every page ofmy website (like ip address, browser, referring page, etc). Now this is easy to do. What I am interested is doing this in a way so as to cause minimum overhead (runtime) in the php scripts. What is the best approach for this efficiency-wise:...
Hi everybody! What is the most efficient way to read bytes (8-16 K) from SQL Server using SqlDataReader. It seems I know 2 ways: byte[] buffer = new byte[4096]; MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(); long l, dataOffset = 0; while ((l = reader.GetBytes(columnIndex, dataOffset, buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0) { stream.Write(buffer,...
You can do this: .info { padding: 5px ; } Or, if you know it will be a div, you can do this div.info { padding: 5px ; } So, when there's a nested list.. you can do this.. div.info ul.navbar li.navitem a.sitelink { color: #f00; } Or you can do this a.sitelink { color: #f00; } Readability aside, which is better ...
Hello! I am a student of Computer Science and have learned many of the basic concepts of what is going on "under the hood" while a computer program is running. But recently I realized that I do not understand how software events work efficiently. In hardware, this is easy: instead of the processor "busy waiting" to see if something hap...
I plan to add a better search feature to my site, so I thought that I would write it in C and use the CGI as a means to access it. But it seems that Perl is the most popular language when it comes to CGI-based stuff. Why is that? Wouldn't it be faster programmed in C or machine code? What advantages, if any, are there to writing it in a...
hello, I have a directory with files and a database table with what should be the same files. I would like to be able to synchronize the database table with the directory. What would be the most efficient way to do this? or would I realistically only be able to do this in a brute manner? Here's my approach: 1. retrieve all of the files...
I have a fixed array of constant integer values about 300 items long (Set A). The goal of the algorithm is to pick two numbers (X and Y) from this array that fit several criteria based on input R. Formal requirement: Pick values X and Y from set A such that the expression X*Y/(X+Y) is as close as possible to R. That's all there is to ...
I'm creating a shell-like environment. My original method of handleing user input was to use a dictionary mapping commands (strings) to methods of various classes, making use of the fact that functions are first class objects in python. For flexibility's sake (mostly for parsing commands), I'm thinking of changing my setup such that I'm...