Code Complete, 2nd Edition

Iteration

Once you've identified a performance bottleneck, you'll be amazed at how much you can improve performance by code tuning. You'll rarely get a 10-fold improvement from one technique, but you can effectively combine techniques; so keep trying, even after you find one that works.

I once wrote a software implementation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Actually, I didn't write it once—I wrote it about 30 times. Encryption according to DES encodes digital data so that it can't be unscrambled without a password. The encryption algorithm is so convoluted that it seems like it's been used on itself. The performance goal for my DES implementation was to encrypt an 18K file in 37 seconds on an original IBM PC. My first implementation executed ...