Re: Followup: opinions on Search services

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:

> > So your statement about "real performance killer" should probably be
> > qualified.  As a general purpose statement, it is as precise as stating
> > that "good stuff is better than bad stuff".  Well, duh.

Okay sorry that was a bit too strong of a statement by me.

> Adding on to this, if one designs their programs correctly the actual
> call overhead is negligible.  The only reason one would optimize by
> using a lower level language is if a block of code, usually in some sort
> of long running loop, is taking too long to finish.  In that case most
> of the time is spent in the call itself rendering the overhead of making
> the call negligible.

The issue here is memory and the garbage collector rather than loops. 
The Boehm GC is particularly slow at allocating large objects on the 
managed heap and the resulting fragmentation causes both poor 
performance (the GC spends an inordinate amount of CPU time searching 
for free blocks) and excessive memory consumption.

Indexing large files requires dynamic allocation of large amounts of 
memory hence my opinion that garbage collected languages are not optimal 
for this situation. Im not a luddite and I do like both python and C# 
and I would certainly use them for GUI stuff over C anyday. However for 
a back end service that is  both CPU and memory intensive I maintain 
that IMHO C in this particular case is a better choice.


> Ok, this is getting a bit off the topic.  Sufficed to say telling a
> developer not to use such and such language is counter productive.

Ok sorry I was not telling or demanding merely voicing my opinion on the 
subject. Im not bashing any particular language just giving my thoughts 
on what is best in this case thats all. Im certainly not trying to start 
a language flamewar and I have tried to keep my criticism of both search 
engines constructive.

jamie.

> --
> J5