one of the projects i’ve been tasked with is to figure out how to bypass some of the performance problems we’ve been having due to various factors, not excluding INTERNET LATENCY. basically, one of my projects uses external web services to access information. apparently, these one trusted internet web services are no longer as trusted as we would like them to be so i’ve been tasked with trying to better optimize the way in which we utilize these web services.

so this, of course, screams for some kind of caching mechanism. i have never been a fan of programming caches. i think the concept is great and i think that those people who love to eke out performance from their apps should be held up on a pedestal because i hate performance tuning. i was telling nelson the other day that i would never work at a job where i would be forced to write code as tightly as possible for performance reasons.

now i don’t write sloppy code, but i don’t sit around fumbling with assembly language bypassing every little JMP and INT’ing this or that to get what i want. man, that’s some serious pain, yo. that’s what nice high level languages are for. if i had my way, all of my code would look something like:

function bigProject(someVars) {
  doIt(someVars);
}

see….easy cheesy. someone should get on that and make it work. anyway, i hate optimizing code because now that you’ve got something that is working perfectly well you have to start doing crazy things with them. cache management, expiration, manual override, force update of the cache, indexing, ugh, who knows what else? they just aren’t fun things. i just like making things work. after that, the fun of the project sort of fades away.

i don’t know why i feel like this. i used to LOVE performance enhancement work. i used to sit and try and devise new and clever ways to get things to work faster and better. i guess i’ve been spoiled lately with all the cheap hardware that’s available for servers these days.

*sigh* i’m such a lazy programmer. i could never do work like [url=http://www.track15.com]dardy[/url] either. man, trying to get a response in nanoseconds is just crazy. the benchmarks i run make anything subsecond still GREAT!

maybe that’s what i should do…promote a slower pace of life because in this day and age we are all caught up in the rat race that maybe we need to wait every so often to gain a little perspective. it’ll be a code feature: reflection time^TM, i’ll call it. yeah, that sounds like a great idea!

ugh…back to writing the cache…

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