Optimizing memory performance
The first reaction many programmers have when they learn the material from the previous section is often this: "Thanks, I understand now why my program is slow, but I have to process the amount of data I have, not the ideal 32 KB, and the algorithm is what it is, including the complex data access pattern, so there is nothing I can do about it." This chapter would not be worth much if we didn't learn how to get better memory performance for the problems we need to solve. In this section, we will learn the techniques that can be used to improve memory performance.
Memory-efficient data structures
The choice of data structures, or, more generally, data organization, is usually the most important decision the programmer makes as far as memory performance is concerned. It is important to understand what you can and cannot do: the memory performance shown in Figure 4.5 and Figure 4.6 is really all there is, and you can't get around...
