The Fifth Kind of Optimisation (tratt.net)
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When I migrated this website to a Rust-based markdown system a couple of years ago, my software at first processed one page at a time. Irritatingly regularly, I would save a page, which automatically rebuilds the site, switch to my browser, press reload, and find that… nothing had changed. I’d managed to do all this before the site had rebuilt in the background, confusing the life out of me!
A quick measurement showed that rebuilding the site took around 0.6s to run in “quick” mode. Unfortunately, profiling didn’t show any stand-out hot spots that I could try optimising.
Fortunately, I had a trick up my sleeve: I made my website builder process pages in parallel using multi-threading. The “quick” build time more than halved (to below 0.3s) and suddenly I could no longer refresh my browser before the site had rebuilt. Multi-threading benefits “deploy” mode – the output of which you’re currently reading – even more, making it more than 3x faster.
Using multiple threads to parallelise my website builder wasn’t about improving performance for the sake of it: the better performance I gained from parallelisation increased my effectiveness.