Archive for the ‘ Software Engineering ’ Category

Look Before You Look Before You Leap

Generally, I try to avoid turning this blog into some sort of snark-fest about other programmers or blogs. I’ve disagreed with Jeff Atwood once or twice though, and so by posting this I’m probably straying a little close to the edge…but what the hell.

A couple of days ago Coding Horror carried a fluff piece about how all developers should be marketers too. Predictably, the article soon got posted to proggit where it was ripped on by reddit’s resident Jeff-haters, and even more predictably the comments were a mix of interesting insight and barely-concealed hate.

Apparently some of them got up Jeff’s nose a bit, and today he responded. The core of his rebuttal seems to be that you shouldn’t trust what you read on blogs, and should verify everything yourself. True enough, I guess, if perhaps a bit impractical given the sheer amount of information out there.

Then, however, Jeff goes on to give an example by referencing a compression benchmark he’d read on a blog and providing counter-analysis to show that the benchmark was wrong in claiming Deflate is faster than gzip. In doing so, much knowledge was gained.

Or so we are told.

The comment thread quickly becomes a goldmine of humour. Bugs in Jeff’s benchmarking code (not resetting the stopwatch) meant that the durations were cumulative, not independent, with inevitable distortion of the results. Another commenter pointed out that gzip cannot possibly be faster than Deflate, since the gzip algorithm IS the Deflate algorithm plus some additional computation.

“gzip” is often also used to refer to the gzip file format, which is:

  • a 10-byte header, containing a magic number, a version number and a timestamp
  • optional extra headers, such as the original file name,
  • a body, containing a DEFLATE-compressed payload
  • an 8-byte footer, containing a CRC-32 checksum and the length of the original uncompressed data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip

With the benchmarking code fixed, we see that Deflate is indeed slightly faster than gzip.

All of which leads to repeated quotations from Jeff about the community being smarter than him, and some drastic toning down of language in post-publication edits to the article. I read a cached version of the RSS feed, which is markedly different to the article currently live on codinghorror.com – “on my box, GZip is twice as fast as Deflate” becomes “on my box, GZip is just as fast as Deflate”, “Deflate is way slower. It’s not even close” becomes “Deflate is nowhere near 40% faster”, etc.

Anyone who’s tackled a major performance problem will likely agree that profiling is a tremendously valuable technique that should always be applied before attempting to optimise (i.e. look before you leap). I think this little episode has highlighted a couple of important things to bear in mind, however:

  1. Profiling isn’t a magic wand – if you use buggy profiling code, you are leading yourself up the garden path.
  2. Profiling is less useful when you can reason (in the mathematical sense) about the code. That involves understanding the algorithms you are dealing with. Gzip is Deflate plus a bit more processing – so unless that extra processing has a negative duration gzip must necessarily take longer. You don’t need a profiler to work that out. Look before you look before you leap.

Anyway, enough hatcheting from me, normal service will be resumed shortly.

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2008
10/24
CATEGORY
.Net
Coding
Software Engineering
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Project Euler Problem 6

Onwards to…

Problem 6

The sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers is,

12 + 22 + … + 102 = 385

The square of the sum of the first ten natural numbers is,

(1 + 2 + … + 10)2 = 552 = 3025

Hence the difference between the sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers and the square of the sum is 3025 385 = 2640.

Find the difference between the sum of the squares of the first one hundred natural numbers and the square of the sum.

Bit of a disappointment, problem 6; it’s too easy. It’s rated as the third-easiest, i.e. easier than problems 3, 4, and 5 which I’ve already covered. In fact, for my money it’s easier than problem 2 as well. Ah well, the difficulty ramps up soon enough, trust me.  Here’s the very simple python solution:

sum_sq = sum([ x*x for x in xrange(1, 101)])
sq_sum = sum(xrange(1, 101)) ** 2
 
print sq_sum - sum_sq

As you can see, it’s pretty intuitive. You sum the squares, square the sum, and calculate the difference. The answer is basically in the description, you just have to scale up a little.

There’s not much else to say about this one. Even if I abandon the functional approach and write a straightforward imperative solution it’s still very straightforward. In (deliberately non-idiomatic, so don’t whine at me) ruby:

sum_of_squares = 0
sum = 0
 
1.upto 100 do |x|
    sum_of_squares += x * x
    sum += x
end
 
p (sum * sum) - sum_of_squares
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2008
08/14
CATEGORY
Coding
Mathematics
Project Euler
Software Engineering
3 comments

Magic Numbers and Other Numerical Nightmares

There are many coding practices that are near-universally regarded as ‘bad’, yet somehow keep cropping up over and over again. Conditional-branch abuse (including, yes, gotos). Deep nesting. Cryptic variable names. Global variables. Tight coupling. Entangled business/presentation logic. I could go on.

Why do we keep doing it? Convenience? Laziness? Tiredness? Is unreadable spaghetti code some sort of steady-state/equilibrium for code? Is it a natural consequence of the vague and squidgy limitations of our evolved monkey-brains? Or is well-designed code abhorred like a vacuum and naturally atrophies into the sort of shambles you dread seeing on your first day at a new job, unless well-intentioned and dedicated people actively work to clean and polish it, like the Forth Bridge?

I don’t have the time or wit to give this subject the treatment it deserves, but I do want to rant a bit about another symptom of this disease, which has given me a couple of sleepless nights recently. I refer, as the title might suggest, to magic numbers.

Magic numbers are constants, unnamed in the most pathological cases, that represent an assumption or a limit in a piece of code. They often cause problems because soon they are forgotten about or their meaning is lost – and then something happens to invalidate the assumption, the code breaks, and all hell breaks loose.

Magic numbers, to stretch the definition a bit, can also be implicit. If you are using a 32-bit integer, your magic number is 2,147,483,647 – that’s the biggest number you can store in that type. Often, movement up to and beyond these ranges can trigger long-dormant bugs that are no fun at all to diagnose.

Three times in recent history I’ve been bitten by bugs of this class, triggered by auto-incrementing sequences in database. These are they:

  1. A table in a database had a 32-bit integer primary key. At the time this seemed like a perfectly reasonable default, but insanely fast growth in usage of the system meant that the ~2.1billion upper limit of that data type was quickly reached. The DB column was switched to a 64-bit integer, but some of the client applications reading that table were not identified as at-risk. When the sequence generator left the 32-bit range, those applications overflowed. This happened at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon. Saturdays were peak-times for system usage. You can imagine the frantic hacking that ensued.
  2. A sequence generator for a particular entity was started at 20,000,000, so as not to clash with the ID sequence of a related entity (that had started at 0 a good few years earlier). The similarity between the entities and the need to not have the IDs overlap had valid business justification, but the magic number was selected arbitrarily and promptly forgotten. Inevitably, the latter sequence surpassed that number, causing bizarre and difficult-to-trace entity relationship corruption that manifested as strangely-disappearing data on the front-end.
  3. A stored procedure parameter was incorrectly declared as an OracleType.Float, when it should have been an OracleType.Int32. This resulted in the value being cast from an integer to a floating-point and back again. For the first 16,777,216 integers, this happens to work OK. For the value 16,777,217, however, the loss in precision means that the number changes during casting. This simple bit of (heavily contrived) code shows the problem: 
    static void Main(string[] args)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < 17000000; ++i)
    {
        if (i != (int)(float)i)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("{0} != {1}", i, (int)(float)i);
            break;
        }
    }
}

    There are many numbers above 16,777,217 that have this characteristic; 16,777,217 just happens to be the first, for reasons you can probably divine if you think the IEEE floating-point spec is a riveting read. A couple of weeks after the launch of a fairly major internal application, this time-bomb exploded due to a sequence reaching the magic number. The bug was nothing to do with the new application, but of course fingers were pointed at it since a long-running and stable system had mysteriously choked very shortly after deployment of the new application.

Now, unquestionably, all these problems are avoidable, and a strong argument could be made that none of them should ever have been allowed to happen. Yet, for many reasons, they do. For example, first-mover advantage can mean the opportunity cost of taking the time to do things right first time is greater than the cost of fixing problems later.

Also, people make assumptions. The issue underlying the Millennium Bug hysteria was caused by well-meaning developers who knew that two-digit dates wouldn’t work after 1999 (effectively another magic number), but assumed the software would have been replaced or upgraded by then. No doubt that seemed a totally reasonable assumption in the 1970s, and it had genuine technical benefits (storage space was so tight that every byte saved was a battle won).

Anyway, I don’t have a magic bullet solution for this, I’m just venting spleen. Unit tests can help, but won’t magically eliminate this class of bug (no matter what some of the more extreme TDD fanatics might tell you), so I suppose the lesson to take from this is the importance of being able to recognise and diagnose potential magic number issues. Pay close attention to data types, type conversions, and current values of sequences in your database. Keeping a sacrifical goat on hand might pay dividends too, in case any blood-thirsty deities with a head for binary arithmetic are watching.

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2008
08/13
CATEGORY
Coding
Software Engineering
2 comments

Dynamic Async Batching with PFX

The PFX Team blog has been posting some excellent articles recently on the subject of task batching using the June 2008 CTP release of the Task Parallel Library. It’s really cool to see some of these techniques abstracted properly in .Net, and I hope it eventually becomes part of the core libraries.

I’ve been playing around a bit recently with the June CTP in the context of batching up web service calls, as that’s something I do quite a lot. One particular problem that comes up occasionally is a two-stage series of requests to download a complete set of paged data. I might do this if I wanted to download an entire discussion thread, for instance, or a large account statement from my online bank.

Typically in this situation the web service will limit the number of records I can retrieve in one request, and allow me to specify start and count parameters to the request. The response will also include a total record count, so I know how much data there is.

The normal use case for this is to request the first page of data, and use the total record count to display a list of page links that my user can click on to navigate the data or jump to any page. In my case, however, I want ALL the data as quickly as possible.

So, imagine a situation where I am using a service that lets me download a maximum of 200 records per request. My first step is to request the maximum 200 records starting from index 0, i.e. the first page of data. In the response will be a total record count – if that number is equal to the number of records I got back (i.e. <= 200) I’ve got everything in one hit and can stop. But what if the total record count is, say, 1000? I need to make four more requests (since I’ve already got records 1-200, I have 800 more to get in batches of 200 each).

Naturally I want to do this asynchronously, using as few resources as I can. This means all webservice calls should be using the APM pattern (thus using IO completion ports, and not consuming worker threads from the thread pool or creating my own threads) and, preferably, not blocking anywhere except when I actually need some data before continuing.

The two-stage process can be successfully captured asynchronously by combining a future and a continuation. I encapsulate the initial request in a Future object (which is a subclass of Task), and handle the check-record-count-and-get-more-records-if-required logic in the continuation. The code for this basically looks as follows:

public Future<List<Item>> GetAllItemsAsync()
{
    var f = Create<GetItemsResponse>(
            ac => Service.BeginGetItems(0, ac, null),
            Service.EndGetItems);

    var start = 200;

    var resultFuture = f.ContinueWith(
        r =>
            {
                // Batch retrieval here...
            });

    return resultFuture;
}

In order to support the APM pattern neatly, I’m using the following method from the PFX blog:

private static Future<T> Create<T>(
        Action<AsyncCallback> beginFunc,
        Func<IAsyncResult, T> endFunc)
{
    var f = Future<T>.Create();
    beginFunc(iar =>
        {
            try
            {
                f.Value = endFunc(iar);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                f.Exception = e;
            }
        });
    return f;
}

This could be coded as an extension method, though I haven’t bothered yet as I’m hopeful this immensely useful snippet will be integrated into the library itself.

Now I need to make a number of calls to get the rest of the data, so I loop until I’ve made the required number of async service calls:

var resultFuture = f.ContinueWith(r =>
    {
        var items = new ConcurrentQueue<Item>();
        var handles = new List<WaitHandle>();

        while (start < r.Value.TotalRecordCount)
        {
            var asyncResult = Service.BeginGetItems(200,
                ar => Service.EndGetItems(ar).Items
                    .ForEach(items.Enqueue), null);

            handles.Add(asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle);
            start += 200;
        }

        handles.ForEach(h => h.WaitOne());
        return items.ToList();
    });

I’m about 85% happy with this as an approach. I’m not completely happy, however, because of the WaitOne calls, which mean that I’m blocking on a threadpool thread until all the calls complete. Given that this is all wrapped up in a future, I may not actually need to access the data until well after the calls have completed, in which case I am wastefully consuming a threadpool thread for some period of time. So the $64,000 question is, how do I get rid of it? I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but my brain has gone on a protest march about all the time I’m forcing it to spend thinking about this stuff.

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2008
08/08
CATEGORY
.Net
Coding
Patterns
Software Engineering
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Comment Discontent

There seems to have been a recent outbreak in blog posts about code commenting. As is so often the case with topics such as this, everyone has an opinion and they all seem to be different. It’s quite an eye-opener seeing some of the explanations, justifications, and outright haranguing used in defence of all sorts of weird and wonderful stances.

I got a wry smile from stevey’s post, as I recognise only too well the tendency to write narrative comments. I’m sure there’s plenty of code from early in my career still floating around in various company codebases where the code/comment ratio is something embarrassing. I’ve mostly shaken that off now, though I sometimes have to fight my inner raconteur when writing something I think is neat or clever.

Jeff Atwood, as is so often the case recently, contradicted his own previous post on the matter (replacing the statement “comments can never be replaced by code alone” with “if your feel your code is too complex to understand without comments, your code is probably just bad”) and endearingly veered wildly to and fro across a sensible medium[1], without ever quite hitting it. Coding Horror, indeed.

So far, so blah; every time an argument on comments flares up we see the same thing. Something I’ve not noticed before though, either because I wasn’t paying attention or because it’s a new thing, is a trend amongst the I-don’t-need-comments crowd to advocate very long and detailed method names as an alternative.

As neophyte coders we all have it drilled into us that we must use descriptive names. Programming gospel, as handed down in sacred tomes such as Code Complete, tell us not to use names like ‘i’ and ‘tmp’ except in very specific circumstances (e.g. loop indexes and tempfile handles). And, without question, this is good solid advice. Take heed, young Padawan, etc.

But can you take it too far? It’s not something I’ve really come up against, but it seems to be increasingly popular. One response to Jeff’s post suggested (only in passing, to be fair) using a function name like newtonRaphsonSquareRoot. A digg comment (OK, OK, not exactly the fount of all knowledge) vehemently defended the virtue of the frankly-scary RunEndOfMonthReportsUnlessTheMonthStartsOnAFridayIn
WhichCaseRunTheWeeklyReportInstead (!)

The argument is that with names like these, you don’t need comments, since it is perfectly clear what the function does. Is it perfectly clear at the wrong level though? Function names like this, in my opinion, are so ‘clear’ that they leak. These are function names that violate the principle of encapsulation.

If I write a square root function, why do I need to burden all my clients with information about how I’ve implemented it? By naming it newtonRaphsonSquareRoot, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Unless there are specific performance implications/requirements that favour Newton-Raphson, in most cases my clients just want a damn square root calculated to within a specified tolerance and don’t care whether I used Newton’s method or one of the army of alternatives. The implementation should be private to the method, and no-one else’s business.

Worse, what if a requirements change means a switch to Walsh’s fast reciprocal method? Uh-oh, now my method name is completely misleading, so I have to change it. Oops, now I have to change all the client code that calls it! I’d better hope no-one has exposed this with [WebMethodAttribute] since I wrote it, otherwise there could be thousands of client applications out there relying on it. My funky rename refactoring can’t save me now.

If every tiny change propagates through the system requiring hundreds of source files to change, and possibly external apps as well, you may as well just copy ‘n’ paste the code everywhere it’s needed and doing away with the function completely. Hell, who needs abstraction anyway?

We all do, of course, which is why I think names like this are a bad smell. The same goes for RunEndOfMonthReportsUnless... – what happens when the requirements change? This method name couples the public interface (method name) to the private implementation, which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do. RunEndOfMonthReports is probably sufficient. Separate interface and implementation. This is programming 101, people, it shouldn’t be beyond our grasp.

[1]I agree with Dan Dyer that the best choice is as follows:

/**
 *  Approximate the square root of n, to within the specified
 *  tolerance, using the Newton-Raphson method.
 */
private double approximateSquareRoot(double n, double tolerance)
{
    double root = n / 2;
    while (abs(root - (n / root)) > tolerance)
    {
        root = 0.5 * (root + (n / root));
    }
    return root;
}

The function name is descriptive and clear whilst remaining general enough to allow an alternative implementation. Anyone who cares enough about the implementation (for performance reasons, or simply curiosity) can find enough information in the comment to start their investigation, without having the details jammed in their face every time they call it.

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2008
07/30
CATEGORY
Software Engineering
4 comments