Retrofitting Memoization : an exploratory study

ActFact is a software development company which delivers Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as part of a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. As part of their effort to improve the scalability of their software stack, they wanted to investigate the possibilities for them to use memoization techniques to reduce unnecessary repetition of expensive function calls, such as database access and parsing and evaluation of expressions. This project aims to investigate different memoization techniques, in order to determine which of them best suits the company’s needs. Their comparative performance have been measured between the methods, as well as the implications that implementing each of these techniques would have on the rest of the system. Based on these metrics, a recommendation was made to employ method level memoization as outlined in this paper.