Kinds of Fat and Molasses
In code tuning you find the parts of a program that are as slow as molasses in winter and as big as Godzilla and change them so that they are as fast as greased lightning and so skinny they can hide in the cracks between the other bytes in RAM. You always have to profile the program to know with any confidence which parts are slow and fat, but some operations have a long history of laziness and obesity, and you can start by investigating them.
Common Sources of Inefficiency
Here are several common sources of inefficiency:
Input/output operations. One of the most significant sources of inefficiency is unnecessary input/output (I/O). If you have a choice of working with a file in memory vs. on disk, in a database, or across ...
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