Improving Performance

Abstract

Performance has to be one of the most frequent worries among developers—no one wants their code to run visibly slowly. Despite the huge power of modern processors and large amounts of random access memory (RAM) available, it’s still not hard to design an application badly with the result that some bottleneck or piece of inefficient code causes a visible and unnecessary slowdown. As one obvious example, I never cease to be amazed when I ask Windows Explorer to delete one file, and it takes a couple of seconds to do so on my 2GHz-plus Athlon machine! Even without the burden of obviously poor design, some applications place such intensive demands on a system that considering performance when coding them is vitally important. Traditionally, games are the main candidates here, but the same applies to some more complex database queries, to intensive numerical code, and to areas such as regular-expression processing. Any operations that need to be performed over a network can also impact performance.