我大半辈子都在这里度过。大致的方法是运行你的分析器并记录它:

Cache misses. Data cache is the #1 source of stalls in most programs. Improve cache hit rate by reorganizing offending data structures to have better locality; pack structures and numerical types down to eliminate wasted bytes (and therefore wasted cache fetches); prefetch data wherever possible to reduce stalls. Load-hit-stores. Compiler assumptions about pointer aliasing, and cases where data is moved between disconnected register sets via memory, can cause a certain pathological behavior that causes the entire CPU pipeline to clear on a load op. Find places where floats, vectors, and ints are being cast to one another and eliminate them. Use __restrict liberally to promise the compiler about aliasing. Microcoded operations. Most processors have some operations that cannot be pipelined, but instead run a tiny subroutine stored in ROM. Examples on the PowerPC are integer multiply, divide, and shift-by-variable-amount. The problem is that the entire pipeline stops dead while this operation is executing. Try to eliminate use of these operations or at least break them down into their constituent pipelined ops so you can get the benefit of superscalar dispatch on whatever the rest of your program is doing. Branch mispredicts. These too empty the pipeline. Find cases where the CPU is spending a lot of time refilling the pipe after a branch, and use branch hinting if available to get it to predict correctly more often. Or better yet, replace branches with conditional-moves wherever possible, especially after floating point operations because their pipe is usually deeper and reading the condition flags after fcmp can cause a stall. Sequential floating-point ops. Make these SIMD.

我还喜欢做一件事:

将编译器设置为输出程序集清单，并查看它为代码中的热点函数发出了什么。所有那些聪明的优化，“一个好的编译器应该能够自动为你做”?实际的编译器可能不会执行这些操作。我见过GCC发出真正的WTF代码。

分而治之

如果正在处理的数据集太大，则对其中的大块进行循环。如果代码编写正确，实现应该很容易。如果您有一个单片程序，现在您就更清楚了。

你在什么硬件上运行?您是否可以使用特定于平台化的优化(如向量化)? 你能找到更好的编译器吗?比如从GCC换成Intel? 你能让你的算法并行运行吗? 可以通过重新组织数据来减少缓存丢失吗? 可以禁用断言吗? 对编译器和平台进行微优化。在if/else语句中，把最常见的语句放在前面

调整操作系统和框架。

这听起来可能有点夸张，但可以这样想:操作系统和框架被设计用来做很多事情。您的应用程序只做非常具体的事情。如果你能让操作系统完全满足你的应用程序的需求，并让你的应用程序理解框架(php，.net,java)是如何工作的，你就能从硬件上得到更好的东西。

例如，Facebook改变了Linux中的一些内核级别的东西，改变了memcached的工作方式(例如，他们写了一个memcached代理，使用udp而不是tcp)。

另一个例子是Window2008。Win2K8有一个版本，你可以安装运行X应用程序所需的基本操作系统(例如web应用程序，服务器应用程序)。这大大减少了操作系统在运行进程方面的开销，并为您提供了更好的性能。

当然，你应该在第一步就投入更多的硬件……

我花了一些时间优化在低带宽和长延迟网络(例如卫星、远程、离岸)上运行的客户端/服务器业务系统，并能够通过相当可重复的过程实现一些显著的性能改进。

Measure: Start by understanding the network's underlying capacity and topology. Talking to the relevant networking people in the business, and make use of basic tools such as ping and traceroute to establish (at a minimum) the network latency from each client location, during typical operational periods. Next, take accurate time measurements of specific end user functions that display the problematic symptoms. Record all of these measurements, along with their locations, dates and times. Consider building end-user "network performance testing" functionality into your client application, allowing your power users to participate in the process of improvement; empowering them like this can have a huge psychological impact when you're dealing with users frustrated by a poorly performing system. Analyze: Using any and all logging methods available to establish exactly what data is being transmitted and received during the execution of the affected operations. Ideally, your application can capture data transmitted and received by both the client and the server. If these include timestamps as well, even better. If sufficient logging isn't available (e.g. closed system, or inability to deploy modifications into a production environment), use a network sniffer and make sure you really understand what's going on at the network level. Cache: Look for cases where static or infrequently changed data is being transmitted repetitively and consider an appropriate caching strategy. Typical examples include "pick list" values or other "reference entities", which can be surprisingly large in some business applications. In many cases, users can accept that they must restart or refresh the application to update infrequently updated data, especially if it can shave significant time from the display of commonly used user interface elements. Make sure you understand the real behaviour of the caching elements already deployed - many common caching methods (e.g. HTTP ETag) still require a network round-trip to ensure consistency, and where network latency is expensive, you may be able to avoid it altogether with a different caching approach. Parallelise: Look for sequential transactions that don't logically need to be issued strictly sequentially, and rework the system to issue them in parallel. I dealt with one case where an end-to-end request had an inherent network delay of ~2s, which was not a problem for a single transaction, but when 6 sequential 2s round trips were required before the user regained control of the client application, it became a huge source of frustration. Discovering that these transactions were in fact independent allowed them to be executed in parallel, reducing the end-user delay to very close to the cost of a single round trip. Combine: Where sequential requests must be executed sequentially, look for opportunities to combine them into a single more comprehensive request. Typical examples include creation of new entities, followed by requests to relate those entities to other existing entities. Compress: Look for opportunities to leverage compression of the payload, either by replacing a textual form with a binary one, or using actual compression technology. Many modern (i.e. within a decade) technology stacks support this almost transparently, so make sure it's configured. I have often been surprised by the significant impact of compression where it seemed clear that the problem was fundamentally latency rather than bandwidth, discovering after the fact that it allowed the transaction to fit within a single packet or otherwise avoid packet loss and therefore have an outsize impact on performance. Repeat: Go back to the beginning and re-measure your operations (at the same locations and times) with the improvements in place, record and report your results. As with all optimisation, some problems may have been solved exposing others that now dominate.

In the steps above, I focus on the application related optimisation process, but of course you must ensure the underlying network itself is configured in the most efficient manner to support your application too. Engage the networking specialists in the business and determine if they're able to apply capacity improvements, QoS, network compression, or other techniques to address the problem. Usually, they will not understand your application's needs, so it's important that you're equipped (after the Analyse step) to discuss it with them, and also to make the business case for any costs you're going to be asking them to incur. I've encountered cases where erroneous network configuration caused the applications data to be transmitted over a slow satellite link rather than an overland link, simply because it was using a TCP port that was not "well known" by the networking specialists; obviously rectifying a problem like this can have a dramatic impact on performance, with no software code or configuration changes necessary at all.

When you get to the point that you're using efficient algorithms its a question of what you need more speed or memory. Use caching to "pay" in memory for more speed or use calculations to reduce the memory footprint. If possible (and more cost effective) throw hardware at the problem - faster CPU, more memory or HD could solve the problem faster then trying to code it. Use parallelization if possible - run part of the code on multiple threads. Use the right tool for the job. some programing languages create more efficient code, using managed code (i.e. Java/.NET) speed up development but native programing languages creates faster running code. Micro optimize. Only were applicable you can use optimized assembly to speed small pieces of code, using SSE/vector optimizations in the right places can greatly increase performance.