Profilers identify bottlenecks in Perl programs

Run-Time Speed

© Dominic Ziegler, Fotolia

© Dominic Ziegler, Fotolia

Article from Issue 99/2009
Author(s):

Instead of souped up CPUs, simple programming tricks are often all it takes to speed up a program. Profilers can discover bottlenecks that need more TLC from the developer.

If you don't spend all day playing video games, you will be quite happy without the latest and greatest CPU, and you can save money on hardware while saving power and reducing your personal CO² footprint.

But what happens if a Perl program does not perform as well as you would like? As a first step, you might be able to accelerate the program with very little effort by optimizing the code at neuralgic points.

In most cases, just one or two targeted improvements will help you achieve 90 percent of the total optimization potential. The remaining 10 percent are more likely to involve wide-ranging, architectural changes that take 10 times as long to implement and make the resulting program so difficult to maintain that more experienced developers are likely to turn down the option.

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