use Perl

Computers are getting faster, that's for sure. However, they are also getting more cores: new laptops thesedays are dual-core and servers are four-or-more-core. Cores are a fancy word for something a bit like another processor. I happen to have lots of things I want to process independently, but if I only use a single process I'll only use one core, a quarter of those available on my server. That's wasting CPU power. The solution is to do more than one thing at a time and common solutions for this are threading and forking. I've found a particularly neat solution which is a very nice idiom too: parallel foreach with Proc::ParallelLoop Something along the lines of the following, which will parallelise the loop by forking 4 workers at a time:

pareach \@todo, \&generate, { Max_Workers => 4 };

The nice thing is that Linux balances each long-lived process on a core, and suddenly my program runs about four time faster! (Okay, so cores aren't complete CPUs - they tend to have dismal floating point performance - but all I am doing are integer calculations so it is mostly the same in my case).

There are many modules on the CPAN which do something similar, but I particularly like the fact that this is a cute idiom: exactly like a foreach, but slightly parallelised. Neat!

See you at the London.pm social meeting tonight!