I Love Lucy Almost As Much As I Love Successful Optimization Efforts

I've had a good couple of days.

This started a couple of days ago, when I became aware of a rather serious performance problem in some code that I help maintain.  This problem exhibited itself on a busy production machine with lots of users.  Solving this problem was Very Important.

At this point I started gathering data, trying to answer the question "where in the code are things going bad?".

After many hours of data collection, I analyzed the data and got a sense of the general neighborhood of the problem.  I looked at the code in this area and thought about what was really going on in this area of the code.  Eventually, I had a mini-epiphany:  I realized that the algorithm I was looking at was (in a non-obvious way) actually an O(N) algorithm, and that I could probably replace it with an O(1) algorithm.

So, I rolled up my sleeves and implemented that O(1) algorithm I had in mind.  After doing all of the testing that I could think of, I installed the new code on the production machine.

Like I said, this code was running on a production machine with lots of users.  It didn't take long for the traffic load to ramp up.  I'm pretty happy with the results:  before my new code was installed on the production machine, this four-CPU-core machine had a 15-minute load-average of around 12.0 .  After my updated code was deployed on the machine, the 15-minute load-average dropped down to 3.0.

Fifteen-minute load-averages of ~12.0 on a four-core machine remind me of a certain scene from "I Love Lucy".  I'm glad I was able to help solve this problem without having to acquire some new hardware....