Day 11: Plutonian Pebbles
Megathread guidelines
- Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
- You can send code in code blocks by using three backticks, the code, and then three backticks or use something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ if you prefer sending it through a URL
FAQ
- What is this?: Here is a post with a large amount of details: https://programming.dev/post/6637268
- Where do I participate?: https://adventofcode.com/
- Is there a leaderboard for the community?: We have a programming.dev leaderboard with the info on how to join in this post: https://programming.dev/post/6631465
Yeah, I have been using these slow challenges to improve my profiling ability. It is a bit of a dark art though, especially with compiled languages.
My slowest part seems to be the hashmap, but there isnt much I can do about that I think.
Also, if I do a release run I can get 10ms, but that feels like cheating :D
Hey that is what release mode is for! optimizing by unrolling and other tricks is needed, but in your case, I think I remember someone mention their rust release mode is closer to 2 ms.
I did try something like PyPy3 but it seems to be slower by ~3 milliseconds! So I don’t know where I could improve my code any further without unrolling the range(75) loop. though would only make it closer to ~29 ms on avg.
Edit: apparently they updated their code to be closer to 250 micro seconds. that is blazing fast [ link ]
Using release to beat python code is just a very hollow victory :D
It does somewhat depend on how we measure as well, you are benching the algorithm itself, and I’m doing the entire execution time
you are right, I dont think loading the file from disk should be part of it because OS process priority/queue, disk and cache and more headaches on figuring out what is slow. If you want to compare the entire execution including python startup overhead and reading from file and anything extra. it is closer 50 to 60 ms on linux and 80-90 ms on windows. (both hosts, not virtual machines)
My reasoning is that loading the input will eventually either pull from the website or disk. that is not part of the challenge. you could simply just hard code it.
So maybe you should look into adding code to your debug mode or both modes for measuring solving it instead of the entire process loading.
however, someone claims their rust code can do 250 microseconds, so I doubt you have much excuse aside from having “inefficient” code.(you are still fast, just not at the limit of your Language’s performance) only measuring my python algorithm, it is only able to finish in 32000 microseconds.
https://github.com/maneatingape/advent-of-code-rust/blob/main/src/year2024/day11.rs
however, now that I am looking at their
main.rsfile, they do calculate time for completion after process startup and only the algorithm.Yeah, disk loading definitely shouldn’t count if I was timing properly, I’m just lazy and dont want to do proper timing. :D
Most of my slowdown is in the hashmap, looks like that answer deconstructs the hashmap and builds it from a fastmap and a vec. Not sure I want to go down that road, at this stage.
Thanks again for your code and help :)