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Random Acts of Optimization

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#2

Post by 885895 »

>In our case we output the profile buffer to a file and read that into the visualization tool which is conveniently built into Chrome. (You can find more information about the tracing tool here and you can try it out by typing “chrome://tracing/” into your Chrome browser. It is designed for web page profiling, but the format of the input profile data is a simple json format that can be easily constructed from your own data.)

Clever! Never heard of doing that but it makes sense.

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#3

Post by mmanfrin »

This is an interesting article, but Riot hasn't really earned any trust of mine at all as it comes to code quality; for a while they couldn't show the damage output of a spell because it caused the user's other summoner spell to go on cooldown for 15 minutes[1] when they tried.

[1] (https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2hvukl/smi...)

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#4

Post by bpicolo »

mmanfrin wrote: post #3

This is an interesting article, but Riot hasn't really earned any trust of mine at all as it comes to code quality; for a while they couldn't show the damage output of a spell because it caused the user's other summoner spell to go on cooldown for 15 minutes[1] when they tried. [1] ( https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2hvukl/smi... )

"Its defects do not reflect issues with our code base (though there are many), but rather my own hacky implementation."

Every code base has tech debt. You can't predict the requirements of the future, and even if you could, trying to account for them means you never release your product.

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#6

Post by mmanfrin »

bpicolo wrote: post #4
mmanfrin wrote: post #3

This is an interesting article, but Riot hasn't really earned any trust of mine at all as it comes to code quality; for a while they couldn't show the damage output of a spell because it caused the user's other summoner spell to go on cooldown for 15 minutes[1] when they tried. [1] ( https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2hvukl/smi... )

"Its defects do not reflect issues with our code base (though there are many), but rather my own hacky implementation." Every code base has tech debt. You can't predict the requirements of the future, and even if you could, trying to account for them means you never release your product.

This is one of many such issues -- one of the largest complaints about the game from the community is the stability of the game and the frequency with which 'gamebreaking' bugs occur.

e: Addressing your edit:

  Every code base has tech debt. You can't predict the 
  requirements of the future, and even if you could, trying 
  to account for them means you never release your product.
League is a mature game at this point, they have had a lot of time to fix longstanding issues. This isn't 'release day' woes.

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#7

Post by saosebastiao »

This brings up a thought that I've had for a very long time. Almost every type of optimization that a programmer could employ is repeatable. It involves matching patterns ("Identification" in the context of this article), analysis ("Comprehension"), and rewriting ("Iteration").

All of these steps can be efficiently automated. And it turns out that compiler writers collectively know about the vast majority of these techniques, but refuse to implement most of them for what I would consider to be the ultimate copout ever: Compile times. I don't know about you, but I would take 100x increase in compilation times for a release build over a 2x increase in development time due to manual optimization. I'm not sure who wouldn't, especially if it also allows you to eliminate technical debt, eliminate leaky abstractions, and improve code comprehensibility.

Perhaps I'm being overly idealistic, but I can't help but hope for a day that I can work with a high level language and have the compiler take care of optimizations that range from removing redundant elements from struct definitions all the way down to bitshift optimizations like i * 28 == i<<4 + i<<3 + i<<2. And if I have to wait all day long for a release build of something, so be it.

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#9

Post by shepardrtc »

saosebastiao wrote: post #7

This brings up a thought that I've had for a very long time. Almost every type of optimization that a programmer could employ is repeatable. It involves matching patterns ("Identification" in the context of this article), analysis ("Comprehension"), and rewriting ("Iteration"). All of these steps can be efficiently automated. And it turns out that compiler writers collectively know about the vast majority of these te…

There was a HN thread a day or two ago in which someone suggested the idea of a common, open source KV database where compiler optimizations could be stored and curated by a committee. So whenever a compiler recognizes a pattern, it could quickly look up the latest and greatest optimization.

Re: Random Acts of Optimization

#10

Post by forrestthewoods »

saosebastiao wrote: post #7

This brings up a thought that I've had for a very long time. Almost every type of optimization that a programmer could employ is repeatable. It involves matching patterns ("Identification" in the context of this article), analysis ("Comprehension"), and rewriting ("Iteration"). All of these steps can be efficiently automated. And it turns out that compiler writers collectively know about the vast majority of these te…

There is such a thing as profile guided optimization. I don't think their results are particularly impressive. You're basically saying "can't you just" to which the answer is almost always no. No you can't just.
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