Mechanical Symapthy

I came across this article written by Martin Fowler

http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Original I was looking for more info about the LMAX Disruptor after Nathan Marz talked about replacing the traditional queues with the LMAX Disruptor in his Storm 0.8 to increase the overall performance in a meetup.

In second part of the Martin Fowler's article, it was the first time I read the term "Mechanical Sympathy". According to the article, quote "The term comes from race car driving and it reflects the driver having an innate feel for the car, so they are able to feel how to get the best out of it." unquote.  Basically, you need to understand how the modern hardware work in order to squeeze the last drop of the performance. In these days, it is no longer just the disk is a very slow operation, even memory is a very slow operation as well. You want to make sure that your code and data are in the cache to get the performance.


This reminds me the old day when I worked on the embedded system, you needed to consider both the software and hardware could provide in order to come up the best solution.