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:)

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.

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。

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。

缓存!要使几乎任何事情都变得更快，一个便宜的方法(在程序员的努力中)是在程序的任何数据移动区域添加缓存抽象层。无论是I/O还是只是传递/创建对象或结构。通常，向工厂类和读取器/写入器添加缓存是很容易的。

有时缓存不会给你带来太多好处，但这是一种简单的方法，只需添加缓存，然后在没有帮助的地方禁用它。我经常发现这样做可以获得巨大的性能，而无需对代码进行微观分析。

很难对这个问题给出一般的答案。这实际上取决于你的问题领域和技术实现。一种与语言无关的通用技术:识别无法消除的代码热点，并手工优化汇编代码。