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。

谷歌方法是一个选项“缓存它..”只要可能，不要碰磁盘。”

向它扔更多的硬件!

以下是我使用的一些快速而粗糙的优化技术。我认为这是“第一关”优化。

了解时间都花在了什么地方。是文件IO吗?是CPU时间吗?是因为网络吗?是数据库吗?如果IO不是瓶颈，优化IO是没有用的。

了解您的环境了解在哪里进行优化通常取决于开发环境。例如，在VB6中，通过引用传递比通过值传递慢，但是在C和c++中，通过引用传递要快得多。在C语言中，如果返回代码表明失败，尝试一些东西并做一些不同的事情是合理的，而在Dot Net中，捕获异常比尝试前检查有效条件要慢得多。

在频繁查询的数据库字段上构建索引。你几乎总是可以用空间来换取速度。

在要优化的循环内部，我避免了必须进行任何查找。找到循环外的偏移量和/或索引，并重用循环内的数据。

最小化IO尝试以一种减少必须读或写的次数的方式进行设计，特别是在网络连接上

减少抽象代码必须通过的抽象层越多，它就越慢。在关键循环内部，减少抽象(例如，揭示避免额外代码的低级方法)

对于带有用户界面的项目，生成一个新线程来执行较慢的任务使应用程序感觉反应更快，尽管不是。

你通常可以用空间来换取速度。如果有计算或其他密集的操作，看看是否可以在进入关键循环之前预先计算一些信息。

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:)

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。