One of the elementary steps to understand why your application is going slower than expected is to check what your application is doing at a low level. In this chapter, you will understand the importance of low-level optimization, and learn about some tools that will help you find where your bottlenecks are.
In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:
- How the processor works at low level
- CPU caches
- Branch prediction
- How to fix some of the most common bottlenecks
- How to use Callgrind to find your most-used code
- How to use Cachegrind to see where your code might be performing poorly in the cache
- Learn how to use OProfile to know where your program spends most of its execution time
