Improving performance of rav1d video decoder

There's something about real optimization stories that I find fascinating – particularly the detailed ones including step-by-step improvements and profiling to show how numbers got better. In some way, they are satisfying to read.

Nicholas Nethercote's "How to speed up the Rust compiler" writings[1] fall into this same category for me.

Any others?

[1] https://nnethercote.github.io/

(Author here) I'm a huge fan of the "How to speed up the Rust compiler" series! I was hoping to capture the same feeling :)

Having your last name be Ravid really is the icing on your cake.

Real is about the only other codec I see that could be a name, but nobody uses that anymore.

Do your part: name your kids "ffmpeg" and "vp-IX"!

I read an article a while ago where the goal is to process a file as fast as possible and the article talks about compressing the data chunks so they fit in L1 cache. The cache misses were slower than compressing and decompressing the data from L1 cache.

I've been trying to find that article ever since but I'm not able to. Anyone knows the article I'm talking about?

Since you seem to enjoy this kind of writing I'd love to get your feedback on something I've written a while back about branchless partitioning [1]. Despite it being content wise the most work to create of the things I've written about the topic, it found much less attention than other things I've written. So far I've wondered if it was maybe too technical? Would love to get an honest opinion.

[1] https://github.com/Voultapher/sort-research-rs/blob/main/wri...

Just finished reading your linked article. I found it interesting and I experienced similar excitement from the results as mentioned up-thread. There were some new things I learned, too.

I wouldn't say your article is too technical; it does go a bit deeper into details, but new concepts are explained well and at a level I found suitable for myself. Having said that, several times I felt that the text was a bit verbose. Using more succinct phrasing needs, of course, a lot of additional effort, but… I guess it's a kind of an optimization as well. :)

Thx for taking the time and glad to hear you enjoyed it. I keep being impressed by people like Cory Doctorow that can express nearly every sentence they write extremely succinctly and on the point. That's something I aspire to, so hopefully next time I'm a little better at it :)