Don’t ignore naive or "stupid" algorithms — hardware is cheap and fast

I just had a nice reality check. Sort of pleasant in that I realized I could save a LOT of memory usage (like from 35MB down to 9 MB), but also aggravating because I have spent probably 10-20 hours developing a clever algorithm designed for speed.

Lesson learned. I should have built the naive version first. Instead, I wrote up two successively more “brilliant” versions that went through all sorts of hoops to get the most speed out of it. Of course, to do this, they took up all sorts of memory with indexes, and the index creation was starting to take about 10 seconds or longer. I should have just built the naive version.

I just wrote the naive version and realized I could have done that in about 5 minutes and saved many hours of tweaking. The component is a type of indexing component, so there were three metrics: index creation time, lookup time, index size. Here’s a rough comparison just to give an idea:

  Clever Algorithm Naive Algorithm
Index Creation Time 10s 0.3s
Lookup Time 0.0001s 0.005s
Index Size 35MB 9 MB
# items

~27,000

Pretty impressive speed numbers aren’t they! That clever algorithm really rocks. And it would be awesome to use if I was doing a lot of searching consecutively, but the searching in my app is tied to the UI, thus to the user, so in reality 0.005 seconds is not that much different than 0.0001 seconds. <sigh>

The numbers above are from my main machine, which is a Core 2 Duo. Just to be safe I tested the naive algorithm on my 4-year-old Pentium 4 laptop to validate that it still has acceptable performance on an older machine. The creation takes 0.05 seconds, but lookup time isn’t much slower, if at all.

And 9MB index is MUCH better than a 35MB index.

In summary, lessons learned:

  1. Hardware is cheap and fast. Don’t waste time optimizing for speed if you don’t have to. While there are signs the raw speed of a processor is plateauing as multiple cores become more important, in general, speed is always increasing.
  2. If you’re running something when a user inputs something, speed isn’t critical (as long as you have it faster than human response time)
  3. Every application is different, so measure and think critically. If my app needed to run the search 100 times per second, the clever algorithm would definitely be better.
  4. There is almost always a tradeoff between speed and size. Which is more important depends on the app.
  5. Write the dumb algorithm first. It might be good enough and you’ll save yourself hours of development and debugging time.

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2 thoughts on “Don’t ignore naive or "stupid" algorithms — hardware is cheap and fast

  1. Pingback: Philosophical Geek » The users are in control

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