Profiler already proving useful

[Rik]

7/22/11

Daniel,

I wanted to let you know that the profiler is already proving useful.  I
was taking a look at this issue report
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?33680) where the user complained of really
lengthy run times.  He had narrowed it down to a call to regexp() and
replacing it with strsplit seemed to improve matters.  Just for fun, I
decided to try the profiler and see what it thought.  Even without GUIs to
look over the data, it pointed the finger at an entirely different
function, strtrim().  Sure enough, I replaced strtrim with a call to
regexprep and got a 15X speedup. 

This was a win on two fronts.  First, it correctly pointed to the problem
function even when there was programmer bias for a different outcome. 
Second, running the profiler with the replacement allowed me to quickly
verify just what kind of performance gain I was getting.

Kudos to you,
Rik