In this chapter, you learned how the processor really works. You understood the multiple hacks we have in the hardware so that everything runs much, much faster than it would if the CPU was always waiting for the RAM. You also got a grasp of the most common performance issues and some information on how to fix them.
Finally, you learned about the Callgrind, Cachegrind, and OProfile tools, which will help you find those bottlenecks so that you can fix them easily. They will even show where in your source code you can find the slowdowns.
In Chapter 6, Benchmarking, you will learn how to benchmark your application. It is especially interesting to compare it to other applications or to a previous version of your own application. You will learn how to spot changes that make your application slower.
