The Flame Graph:
This visualization of software execution is a new necessity for performance profiling and debugging.
An everyday problem in our industry is understanding how software is consuming resources, particularly CPUs. What exactly is consuming how much, and how did this change since the last software version? These questions can be answered using software profilers, tools that help direct developers to optimize their code and operators to tune their environment. The output of profilers can be verbose, however, making it laborious to study and comprehend. The flame graph provides a new visualization for profiler output and can make for much faster comprehension, reducing the time for root cause analysis.
Efficient Graph Search
Welcome to Drill Bits, a new column about programming. This inaugural episode shows how graph search algorithms can avoid unnecessary work. A simple modification to classic breadth-first search improves the lower bound on its running time: Whereas classic BFS always requires time proportional to the number of vertices plus the number of edges, the improved "Efficient BFS" sometimes runs in time proportional to the number of vertices alone. Both asymptotic analysis and experiments show that Efficient BFS can be much faster than classic BFS.