Re: Multiply Versus Divide

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> My experience is like Bill's.  If the program is a heavy hitter and you can
> easily keep DIV out of the code its worth it.

I just did a benchmark on my system.   A multiply takes 5893 nanoseconds,
and a divide takes 20931 nanoseconds.

This means that if you had code that does ONE MILLION divides, you would
waste about 14 seconds.

It's definitely not worth making your code harder to read to save 14
seconds per day in some big million record processing batch job.

Furthermore, in an interactive app which doesn't do a large
million-iteration loop, the time will never be noticed since it's less
than the time it takes to blink.

In any application you write where you "save time" by using MULT instead
of DIV, I can almost guarantee that there's something else in that app
that's wasting more time than the difference between MULT and DIV.