Summary

In this chapter, you have learned perhaps the single most important lesson in the entire book: it makes no sense to talk, or even think, about performance without referring to specific measurements. The rest is largely craftsmanship: we presented several ways to measure performance, starting from the whole program and drilling down to a single line of code.

A large high-performance project will see every tool and method you learned about in this chapter used more than once. Coarse measurements – benchmarking and profiling the entire program or large parts of it – point to the areas of the code that require further investigation. Additional rounds of benchmarking or the collection of a more detailed profile usually follow. Eventually, you will identify the parts of the code that require optimization, and the question becomes, "how do I do this faster?" At this point, you can use a micro-benchmark or another small-scale benchmark to experiment with...