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[-] Gxost@lemmy.world 42 points 2 days ago

Nah, I was excited to read about the algorithmic change, but it turned out to be an obvious change. I would replace nested loops with a map too. The result is impressive, though.

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 days ago

Marketing departments love to make a huge deal out of this kind of thing, because they only see the big number improvement and don't really understand that this was just some dev's Wednesday afternoon.

[-] x00z@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago

Well it's a 70 times improvement so the developer gets a 70 times bonus. Or at least all the money that would be wasted without this fix.

Or is the world unfair and are developers nowadays just cogs in a capitalistic machine?

[-] abbadon420@lemm.ee 32 points 2 days ago

And they are right to do so. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter how much time you spend on a problem. It's the result that matters. I remember a meme where a dev would place a "wait" function in a new feature. Than remove the wait call and call it a free update and get lots of praise from the customer.

[-] mamotromico@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

I mean, it’s still really impressive upgrade even if technically it was a simple change, they are right to make a fuss about the change

[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago

Worst bugs usually hide in the most trivial causes 😭

[-] arty@feddit.org 7 points 1 day ago

Interesting how it had to get to 48 hours before someone pulled out a profiler

[-] fodor@lemmy.zip 31 points 2 days ago

How cool! This is one great point of FOSS.

[-] manxu@piefed.social 11 points 2 days ago

we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.

I feel like there is something wrong with this sentence.

[-] _taem@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 days ago

I'm not a native speaker, but would agree that it sounds imprecise. To my understanding, that's a polynomial reduction of the time (O(n^2) to O(n): quadratic to linear) and not an exponential speed-up (O(2^n) to O(n): exponential to linear). 🤷 Colloquially, "exponentially" seems to be used synonymously to "tremendously" or similar.

[-] Giooschi@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

and not an exponential speed-up (O(2^n) to O(n): exponential to linear)

Note that you can also have an exponential speed-up when going from O(n) (or O(n^2) or other polynomial complexities) to O(log n). Of course that didn't happen in this case.

[-] kureta@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago
[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 days ago

They make the same mistake further down the article:

However, the implementation of the command suffered from poor scalability related to reference count, creating a performance bottleneck. As repositories accumulated more references, processing time increased exponentially.

This article writer really loves bullet point lists, too. 🤨

[-] ugo@feddit.it 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That’s because LLMs really like to output bullet point lists

[-] ulterno@programming.dev -1 points 1 day ago
  • Welp, guess I am an LLM now :P
[-] Deebster@infosec.pub 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Seem ok to me, both in grammar and what it's saying about the change. O(N²) to O(N) would be an exponential drop (2 down to 1, in fact).

[-] Giooschi@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

An "exponential drop" would be a drop that follow an exponential curve, but this doesn't. What you mean is a "drop in the exponent", which however doesn't sound as nice.

[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

It's at least misleading 😛

But I have to agree that for any non-math people this would convey the right idea, whereas "quadratic improvement" would probably not mean anything 🤷

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago

There isn't. This is the colloquial use of "exponentially" which is very obvious from the context.

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 days ago

On a technical blog post by a software company about the details of solving an algorithmic complexity problem?

Careless, and showing that the author does not understand technical communication, where precision is of great importance.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago

This is fine precisely because it is a blog post. If it was a scientific paper... sure maybe they shouldn't say that. But the meaning is abundantly clear from the context. There is no ambiguity.

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml -5 points 1 day ago
[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 22 hours ago

Because I can read? Lol ok.

[-] Beacon@fedia.io 10 points 2 days ago
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
182 points (98.4% liked)

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