These are two small stories that don't deserve a section of their own, so just like in a best performance optimization manner, they will be batched together (pun intended!).
Two program startup stories
Time system calls
This one happened a long time ago when computers didn't have much CPU power at their disposal. I was only told about this after I joined a project as part of the project's history. At that time, we were developing a Windows GUI application with MFC for the management of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) endpoints.
To cut a long story short, our program suffered from long startup times in the past. The reason turned out to be quite simple, if not to say dumb. The trace subsystem needed...
