The general idea is that you want to identify where your program spends most of its time and focus your optimization efforts there. (E.g., subroutines that are frequently called or that take a long time to execute.) This is what Devel::DProf (and the dprofpp program) does for you.

Once you've identified those areas, you want to find out whether there are things in those sections that can be recoded to take less time. (E.g. something that is computed inside a loop the same way every time should be computed once before the loop starts).

The Wikipedia has an entry on Optimization that might get you started. You might also want to pick up a copy of Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, which (while not Perl specific, despite the title) has a lot of good insights.

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

In reply to Re: DProf-ing A Dist by xdg
in thread DProf-ing A Dist by jk2addict

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.