Memory access is often overlooked. The way o.o. tends to lay out data in memory is not conducive to efficient memory access in practice in loops. Consider the following pseudocode:
adult_clients = 0
for client in list_of_all_clients:
if client.age >= AGE_OF_MAJORITY:
adult_clients++
It so happens that the way this is accessed from memory is quite inefficient on modern architectures because they like accessing large contiguous rows of memory, but we only care for client.age, and of all clients we have; those will not be laid out in contiguous memory.
Focusing on objects that have fields results into data being laid out in memory in such a way that fields that hold the same type of information will not be laid out in consecutive memory. Performance-heavy code tends to involve loops that often look at data with the same conceptual meaning. It is conducive to performance that such data be laid out in contiguous memory.
Consider these two examples in Rust:
// struct that contains an id, and an optiona value of whether the id is divisible by three
struct Foo {
id : u32,
divbythree : Option<bool>,
}
fn main () {
// create a pretty big vector of these structs with increasing ids, and divbythree initialized as None
let mut vec_of_foos : Vec<Foo> = (0..100000000).map(|i| Foo{ id : i, divbythree : None }).collect();
// loop over all hese vectors, determine if the id is divisible by three
// and set divbythree accordingly
let mut divbythrees = 0;
for foo in vec_of_foos.iter_mut() {
if foo.id % 3 == 0 {
foo.divbythree = Some(true);
divbythrees += 1;
} else {
foo.divbythree = Some(false);
}
}
// print the number of times it was divisible by three
println!("{}", divbythrees);
}
On my system, the real time with rustc -O is 0m0.436s; now let us consider this example:
fn main () {
// this time we create two vectors rather than a vector of structs
let vec_of_ids : Vec<u32> = (0..100000000).collect();
let mut vec_of_divbythrees : Vec<Option<bool>> = vec![None; vec_of_ids.len()];
// but we basically do the same thing
let mut divbythrees = 0;
for i in 0..vec_of_ids.len(){
if vec_of_ids[i] % 3 == 0 {
vec_of_divbythrees[i] = Some(true);
divbythrees += 1;
} else {
vec_of_divbythrees[i] = Some(false);
}
}
println!("{}", divbythrees);
}
This runs in 0m0.254s on the same optimization level, — close to half the time needed.
Despite having to allocate two vectors instead of of one, storing similar values in contiguous memory has almost halved the execution time. Though obviously the o.o. approach provides for much nicer and more maintainable code.
P.s.: it occurs to me that I should probably explain why this matters so much given that the code itself in both cases still indexes memory one field at a time, rather than, say, putting a large swath on the stack. The reason is c.p.u. caches: when the program asks for the memory at a certain address, it actually obtains, and caches, a significant chunk of memory around that address, and if memory next to it be asked quickly again, then it can serve it from the cache, rather than from actual physical working memory. Of course, compilers will also vectorize the bottom code more efficiently as a consequence.
