Speeding up User Tools
I spent time today speeding up one of the tools I deliver that is a support web system for one of my major applications. It's a perl CGI app, and there were a lot of things that it was doing that were inefficient. For a single page I was grepping the same file four times for four different sets of data. When I realized that I could grep for any one of the four conditions and then separate it out in the perl to the four cases, it made it use more memory, but was much faster. Typical trade-off: memory for speed, and I wanted to move it as much to the "memory" as possible to get the speed up.
Then I thought that it was possible that there were sections of the web page for certain instruments that some folks don't really look at. If I made those optional, with a checkbox to maintain the state of whether or not to do them, then I could get even more speed out of the system. Nice.
It's nothing that's earth-shaking... but it's nice to get the support guys the best tools I can as they make the app look good.