Open Stack

Gregory Haynes wrote:
> [...]
> All said and done, I think that's almost a 3x speed increase with
> minimal effort. So, can we stop saying that this has anything to do with
> Python as a language and has everything to do with the algorithms being
> used?

Thanks for this analysis, it's really helpful.

> [...]
>> We are a small development team, and after looking at our options, and
>> judging the amount of developer hours we had available, a different
>> language was the route we decided on. I was going to go implement a few
>> POCs and see what was most suitable.
>
> This is what especially surprises me. The problems going on here are
> purely algorithmic, and the thinking is that rather than solve those
> issues the small amount of development time needs to be spent on a re
> implementation which also is going to have costs the the wider community
> due to the language choice.

That is my concern (wearing my Technical Committee chair hat): we should 
not make changes that just move the pain around to other teams and 
create externalities -- we should make changes that are globally 
positive for OpenStack development *overall*. And that is why it's up to 
the TC to make such calls.

If this is an algorithm issue more than a Python issue, maybe a better 
solution would be to come up with a SWAT team of Python performance 
experts (we happen to have a few of them in various corners of our 
community) that can be called in to help optimize the performance of 
critical code. Or some other solution that would just not move the 
effort around.

That said I know that the Swift team spent a lot of time in the past 6 
years optimizing their Python code, so I'm not sure we can generalize 
this "everything to do with the algorithms" analysis to them ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)