如果更好的硬件是一个选择，那么一定要去做。否则

Check you are using the best compiler and linker options. If hotspot routine in different library to frequent caller, consider moving or cloning it to the callers module. Eliminates some of the call overhead and may improve cache hits (cf how AIX links strcpy() statically into separately linked shared objects). This could of course decrease cache hits also, which is why one measure. See if there is any possibility of using a specialized version of the hotspot routine. Downside is more than one version to maintain. Look at the assembler. If you think it could be better, consider why the compiler did not figure this out, and how you could help the compiler. Consider: are you really using the best algorithm? Is it the best algorithm for your input size?

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……

首先，正如前面几个回答中提到的，了解是什么影响了您的性能——是内存、处理器、网络、数据库还是其他东西。这取决于…

...if it's memory - find one of the books written long time ago by Knuth, one of "The Art of Computer Programming" series. Most likely it's one about sorting and search - if my memory is wrong then you'll have to find out in which he talks about how to deal with slow tape data storage. Mentally transform his memory/tape pair into your pair of cache/main memory (or in pair of L1/L2 cache) respectively. Study all the tricks he describes - if you don's find something that solves your problem, then hire professional computer scientist to conduct a professional research. If your memory issue is by chance with FFT (cache misses at bit-reversed indexes when doing radix-2 butterflies) then don't hire a scientist - instead, manually optimize passes one-by-one until you're either win or get to dead end. You mentioned squeeze out up to the last few percent right? If it's few indeed you'll most likely win. ...if it's processor - switch to assembly language. Study processor specification - what takes ticks, VLIW, SIMD. Function calls are most likely replaceable tick-eaters. Learn loop transformations - pipeline, unroll. Multiplies and divisions might be replaceable / interpolated with bit shifts (multiplies by small integers might be replaceable with additions). Try tricks with shorter data - if you're lucky one instruction with 64 bits might turn out replaceable with two on 32 or even 4 on 16 or 8 on 8 bits go figure. Try also longer data - eg your float calculations might turn out slower than double ones at particular processor. If you have trigonometric stuff, fight it with pre-calculated tables; also keep in mind that sine of small value might be replaced with that value if loss of precision is within allowed limits. ...if it's network - think of compressing data you pass over it. Replace XML transfer with binary. Study protocols. Try UDP instead of TCP if you can somehow handle data loss. ...if it's database, well, go to any database forum and ask for advice. In-memory data-grid, optimizing query plan etc etc etc.

HTH:)

减少可变大小(在嵌入式系统中)

如果您的变量大小大于特定体系结构上的单词大小，则会对代码大小和速度产生重大影响。例如，如果你有一个16位系统，经常使用一个长int变量，然后意识到它永远不能超出范围(−32.768…32.767)考虑将其减少到短int。

从我的个人经验来看，如果一个程序已经准备好或几乎准备好了，但是我们意识到它占用了目标硬件程序内存的110%或120%，那么对变量进行快速归一化通常可以解决这个问题。

到这个时候，优化算法或部分代码本身可能会变得令人沮丧的徒劳:

重新组织整个结构，程序就不再像预期的那样工作，或者至少引入了许多错误。 做一些聪明的技巧:通常你花了很多时间优化一些东西，并发现代码大小没有或很小的减少，因为编译器无论如何都会优化它。

Many people make the mistake of having variables which exactly store the numerical value of a unit they use the variable for: for example, their variable time stores the exact number of milliseconds, even if only time steps of say 50 ms are relevant. Maybe if your variable represented 50 ms for each increment of one, you would be able to fit into a variable smaller or equal to the word size. On an 8 bit system, for example, even a simple addition of two 32-bit variables generates a fair amount of code, especially if you are low on registers, while 8 bit additions are both small and fast.

添加这个答案，因为我没有看到它包括在所有其他。

最小化类型和符号之间的隐式转换:

这至少适用于C/ c++，即使你已经认为你已经摆脱了转换——有时测试在需要性能的函数周围添加编译器警告是很好的，特别是注意循环中的转换。

特定于GCC:您可以通过在代码周围添加一些冗长的pragmas来测试这一点，

#ifdef __GNUC__
#  pragma GCC diagnostic push
#  pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wsign-conversion"
#  pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wdouble-promotion"
#  pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wsign-compare"
#  pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wconversion"
#endif

/* your code */

#ifdef __GNUC__
#  pragma GCC diagnostic pop
#endif

我曾见过一些案例，你可以通过减少这样的警告所带来的转化率来获得几个百分点的加速。

在某些情况下，我有一个带有严格警告的头，我保留了这些警告，以防止意外转换，然而这是一种权衡，因为您可能最终会为安静的故意转换添加大量强制转换，这可能会使代码更加混乱，而收益却微乎其微。

OK, you're defining the problem to where it would seem there is not much room for improvement. That is fairly rare, in my experience. I tried to explain this in a Dr. Dobbs article in November 1993, by starting from a conventionally well-designed non-trivial program with no obvious waste and taking it through a series of optimizations until its wall-clock time was reduced from 48 seconds to 1.1 seconds, and the source code size was reduced by a factor of 4. My diagnostic tool was this. The sequence of changes was this:

The first problem found was use of list clusters (now called "iterators" and "container classes") accounting for over half the time. Those were replaced with fairly simple code, bringing the time down to 20 seconds. Now the largest time-taker is more list-building. As a percentage, it was not so big before, but now it is because the bigger problem was removed. I find a way to speed it up, and the time drops to 17 seconds. Now it is harder to find obvious culprits, but there are a few smaller ones that I can do something about, and the time drops to 13 sec.

现在我似乎遇到了瓶颈。样本告诉我它到底在做什么，但我似乎找不到任何可以改进的地方。然后，我考虑了程序的基本设计及其事务驱动结构，并询问它所做的所有列表搜索实际上是否都是由问题的需求强制执行的。

然后我偶然发现了一种重新设计，在这种设计中，程序代码实际上是从一组较小的源代码中生成的(通过预处理器宏)，在这种设计中，程序不会不断地找出程序员知道的相当可预测的事情。换句话说，不要“解释”要做的事情的顺序，要“编译”它。

重新设计完成了，源代码缩减了1 / 4，时间减少到10秒。

现在，因为它变得如此之快，很难进行抽样，所以我给它10倍的工作，但下面的时间是基于原始工作负载的。

进一步的诊断表明，它是在队列管理上花费时间的。内联这些将时间缩短到7秒。 现在一个很大的时间消耗是我一直在做的诊断打印。冲水- 4秒 现在最浪费时间的是调用malloc和free。回收对象- 2.6秒。 继续进行抽样，我仍然发现了严格意义上没有必要的操作——1.1秒。

总加速系数:43.6

Now no two programs are alike, but in non-toy software I've always seen a progression like this. First you get the easy stuff, and then the more difficult, until you get to a point of diminishing returns. Then the insight you gain may well lead to a redesign, starting a new round of speedups, until you again hit diminishing returns. Now this is the point at which it might make sense to wonder whether ++i or i++ or for(;;) or while(1) are faster: the kinds of questions I see so often on Stack Overflow.

附注:可能有人想知道我为什么不用侧写器。答案是，几乎所有这些“问题”都是函数调用站点，堆栈样本可以精确定位。即使在今天，分析人员也只是勉强接受这样一个观点:语句和调用指令比整个函数更重要，更容易定位，也更容易修复。

我实际上构建了一个剖析器来做这件事，但是要真正了解代码正在做什么，没有什么可以替代您的手指。样本数量少并不是问题，因为被发现的问题没有一个小到容易被忽略的程度。

添加:jerryjvl要求一些例子。这是第一个问题。它由少量独立的代码行组成，加在一起占用了一半的时间:

 /* IF ALL TASKS DONE, SEND ITC_ACKOP, AND DELETE OP */
if (ptop->current_task >= ILST_LENGTH(ptop->tasklist){
. . .
/* FOR EACH OPERATION REQUEST */
for ( ptop = ILST_FIRST(oplist); ptop != NULL; ptop = ILST_NEXT(oplist, ptop)){
. . .
/* GET CURRENT TASK */
ptask = ILST_NTH(ptop->tasklist, ptop->current_task)

These were using the list cluster ILST (similar to a list class). They are implemented in the usual way, with "information hiding" meaning that the users of the class were not supposed to have to care how they were implemented. When these lines were written (out of roughly 800 lines of code) thought was not given to the idea that these could be a "bottleneck" (I hate that word). They are simply the recommended way to do things. It is easy to say in hindsight that these should have been avoided, but in my experience all performance problems are like that. In general, it is good to try to avoid creating performance problems. It is even better to find and fix the ones that are created, even though they "should have been avoided" (in hindsight). I hope that gives a bit of the flavor.

下面是第二个问题，分两行:

 /* ADD TASK TO TASK LIST */
ILST_APPEND(ptop->tasklist, ptask)
. . .
/* ADD TRANSACTION TO TRANSACTION QUEUE */
ILST_APPEND(trnque, ptrn)

它们通过在列表的末尾附加项目来构建列表。(解决方法是将项目收集到数组中，并一次性构建列表。)有趣的是，这些语句只花费了原始时间的3/48(即在调用堆栈上)，所以它们实际上在一开始并不是一个大问题。然而，在消除了第一个问题后，它们只花费了3/20的时间，所以现在是一条“大鱼”。总的来说，就是这样。

我可以补充说，这个项目是从我参与的一个真实项目中提炼出来的。在那个项目中，性能问题要严重得多(加速也是如此)，比如在内部循环中调用数据库访问例程来查看任务是否完成。

参考补充道: 源代码，无论是原始的还是重新设计的，都可以在www.ddj.com上找到，1993年，文件9311.zip, files slug。Asc和slug.zip。

编辑2011/11/26: 现在有一个SourceForge项目包含了Visual c++中的源代码，以及它是如何调优的详细描述。它只经历了上述场景的前半部分，并不完全遵循相同的顺序，但仍然获得了2-3个数量级的加速。