Got myself a few months ago into the optimization rabbit hole as I had a slow quant finance library to take care of, and for now my most successful optimizations are using local memory allocators (see my C++ post, I also played with mimalloc which helped but custom local memory allocators are even better) and rethinking class layouts in a more “data-oriented” way (mostly going from array-of-structs to struct-of-arrays layouts whenever it’s more advantageous to do so, see for example this talk).

What are some of your preferred optimizations that yielded sizeable gains in speed and/or memory usage? I realize that many optimizations aren’t necessarily specific to any given language so I’m asking in [email protected].

  • Tom
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    58 months ago

    Yep, absolutely.

    In another project, I had some throwaway code, where I used a naive approach that was easy to understand/validate. I assumed I would need to replace it once we made sure it was right because it would be too slow.

    Turns out it wasn’t a bottleneck at all. It was my first time using Java streams with relatively large volumes of data (~10k items) and it turned out they were damn fast in this case. I probably could have optimized it to be faster, but for their simplicity and speed, I ended up using them everywhere in that project.