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Performance Analysis (cont)

Decades of empirical study of program execution have shown that most programs spend most of their execution time in a small part of their code.

Often quoted as the 90/10 rule   (or 80/20 rule or ...):

``90% of the execution time is spent in 10% of the code''

Implications:

  • most of the code has little impact on overall performance
  • small regions of the code are bottlenecks (aka hot-spots)
To significantly improve performance: make bottlenecks faster.