On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 03:37:47PM -0700, Craig A. James wrote: > Jim C. Nasby wrote: > >http://stats.distributed.net used to use a perl script to do some > >transformations before loading data into the database. IIRC, when we > >switched to using C we saw 100x improvement in speed, so I suspect that > >if you want performance perl isn't the way to go. I think you can > >compile perl into C, so maybe that would help some. > > I use Perl extensively, and have never seen a performance problem. I > suspect the perl-to-C "100x improvement" was due to some other factor, like > a slight change in the schema, indexes, or the fundamental way the client > (C vs Perl) handled the data during the transformation, or just plain bad > Perl code. > > Modern scripting languages like Perl and Python make programmers far, far > more productive than the bad old days of C/C++. Don't shoot yourself in > the foot by reverting to low-level languages like C/C++ until you've > exhausted all other possibilities. I only use C/C++ for intricate > scientific algorithms. > > In many cases, Perl is *faster* than C/C++ code that I write, because I > can't take the time (for example) to write the high-performance string > manipulation that have been fine-tuned and extensively optimized in Perl. Well, the code is all at http://cvs.distributed.net/viewcvs.cgi/stats-proc/hourly/ (see logmod directory and logmod_*.pl). There have been changes made to the C code since we changed over, but you can find the appropriate older versions in there. IIRC, nothing in the database changed when we went from perl to C (it's likely that was the *only* change that happened anywhere around that time). -- Jim Nasby jim@xxxxxxxxx EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)
