Sometimes a program you have written just doesn't run fast enough. In this article I'm going to look at how (and how not) to approach such problems along with some tips for speeding things up in various cases.

Stop Right There!

The biggest mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their programs is jumping straight in and trying to do it without first understanding where the bottleneck lies. Often the real performance issue may not lie where you think it does.

Tools for analyzing program performance are called profilers. They will tell you which functions and sometimes even which lines of the program are taking up what factor of the execution time. This is highly valuable information and can save you a lot of wasted time. Without it, you might set about optimizing a function or method that is only taking a tiny fraction of the execution time anyway...