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Showing posts from February, 2018

Optimizing date calculations

I wrote a naive little algorithm to calculate the end date of a scheduled event. There are the following restraints: Total number of hours Number of hours per day Workdays per week Skip holidays So, the pseudo-code looks like this : While there are hours     If it's a workday          diminish the hour counter by the amount of hours per day     Go to the next day This works, but it's slow. Let's do this moar better! New pseudo-code : Hours / Hours per day                   ===> Days Days / Workdays per week            ===> Weeks (7 - workdays per week) * Weeks ===> More Days  Add the number of days to the initial date to get the end date.  Calculate the number of holidays in the range ===> Days  While there are days     If it's a workday          diminish the day counter by one     Move the end date on day forward. This improved algorithm is 150 times faster than the original for 630 hours, 5 hours per day (or 126 days)