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Program Execution

Observation shows that most programs behave as follows:
  • most execution time is spent in a small part of the code
This is often quoted as the "90/10 rule"   (or "80/20 rule")

This means that

  • most of the code has little impact on overall performance
  • small parts of the code account for most execution time
Concentrate efforts at tuning in the heavily-used code.

(Sometimes this require us to change the code that invokes the heavily-used code)