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Comment by rhinoceraptor | Hacker News Reader

We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of compute power, slowing down everything by a negligible amount is worth it if it makes profiling and observability even 20% easier. In almost all cases you cannot just walk up to a production Linux system and do meaningful performance analysis without serious work, unlike say a Solaris production system from 15 years ago.

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We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of compute power yet all software is still incredibly slow because we and up slowing down everything by a "negligible" amount here and another "negligible" amount there and so on.

> In almost all cases you cannot just walk up to a production Linux system and do meaningful performance analysis without serious work

So? That's one very very very specific use case that others should not have to pay for. Not even with a relatively small 1% perf hit.

The issue is we can't see what running software is doing, because frame pointers are omitted, symbols are stripped, etc. in the name of performance, so we can't see what the software is even doing without changing it. And in many cases changing it will "fix" the symptom, before we can determine what the issue actually was.

When computers are slow, the primary way out is finding out WHY they are slow.

Finding this out requires... meaningful performance analysis. That's right, this 1% perf hit will make it extremely easy to find the reasons for 5,10,20,50% slowdowns, and enable developers (and you!) to fix them.

By making it easier to profile software, YOU can notice performance issues in the software you're running and deliver a nice patch that will improve performance by more than was lost, making this 1% slowdown a very effective, high-interest investment.

Nice sales pitch but in reality no one is going to spend time optimizing bottlenecks that aren't repdoducible. And if you can reproduce them you can do that on systems compiled for profiling to find the cause which isn't even the hard part anyway.

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