Performance – My biggest success so far

In my last post I shared the story of improving performance while using .Net and COM.

While improving from a few minutes to a few seconds seems like a great success (if counting such great times ratios*), I haven’t yet beat myself.
The greatest time I’ve improved was from several hours to a few seconds.

Background

In my first workplace there was a C4I application that showed a vector map. No standards where used as it was first develop 15 years ago, before any standards have evolved. In order for the map to run efficiently, its data was split into tiles. First the tiles in view were presented, and then, in background, the other tiles were loaded.

I want to talk about the tool that cut the one big map into tiles.
That tool was given a map, number of tiles along and across, output folder and several hours to run.

Performance - Using .Net and COM

Yesterday I was given a task to help improve the performance of a feature. I was told that the feature was written in a very straight forward way, nearly no optimizations taken. The problem was that it took several minutes (yes, minutes) to run, rather than a few seconds or better than that.

The story is quite long, so if you have time and patience read its whole. If not or you are just too lazy, skip to the summary at the end