Thursday, July 19, 2007  What were those results again?  This is
a small follow up to my blogs about anti-patterns. When trying
to debug a complex logic or performance problem one of the most
important things one can do is take notes. I had a conversation
with someone the other day where the person said, "I'm in a
rush, I don't have time to take notes about my runs." To this I
replied, you don't have time not too.  So often we are in such a
rush to solve a problem that we cut the wrong corners. When
performance tuning, and/or tracking something down that requires
multiple runs or configurations of your software always always
always take notes on each run. They don't have to be super
formal but you should write down all the details you can think
of. Some examples include, what were my settings, what did the
cpu usage/machine stats look like. What problems did I run into.
Always keep a date/time stamp on the tests. This will prevent
the inevitable rerunning of tests because you forgot the
results, or mixing up