“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”; Donald Knuth
Parallel processing: for instance in R with a single machine.
– doParallel and foreach package
– doParallel: parallel backend, will select n-cores of the machine
– for each: assign tasks for each core
– using Hadoop on a single node
– using Hadoop on multi-node
Faster algorithm:
– In computer science: Pareto principle; 90% of the execution time is spent executing 10% of the code
– Data structure: affect performance
– Caching: avoid unnecessary work
– Improve source code level
For instance: on early C compilers, WHILE(something) was slower than FOR(;;), because WHILE evaluated “something” and then had a conditional jump which tested if it was true while FOR had unconditional jump.
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