On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
apachebench does help with efficiency. It is inefficient (not to mention irresponsible) to wait to benchmark your code until you have a throng of users actually relying on it. Apachebench will allow you to set the header needed to trigger the language content shift in mediawiki while simultaneously hammering the server with such requests. Please think before being hypercritical of reasonable suggestions.
Number one: suggesting "use apachebench" is not really helpful, because anyone who's even the slightest bit competent knows about it. Although I'm sure you were only trying to be helpful, giving very basic suggestions can be taken to imply that you have a very low opinion of your audience's technical knowledge, and tends to offend people.
Number two: no, it's not inefficient to profile instead of benchmark. Benchmarking is artificial and will not trigger real usage patterns. It's inefficient to waste effort tracking down and fixing performance problems that might not arise in the real world, and at the same time a real-life usage pattern could very easily trigger something your benchmarking tool missed. Real-time profiling mostly allows serious performance problems to be identified and fixed within minutes, so it's not irresponsible at all to use it.
Number three: individuals' histories of contributions, both to discussion and to actual code, are normally taken into account by people responding to them.