Computer Programming

What are important factors which affect the

running time of a program?
Anyone can help me list out all of them?

5 ANSWERS

Deeksha Jain
Written 98w ago

Some of the factors that affect the speed of execution are:

1. Parallelism of the Program:

A multi-threaded program that is running on multicore machine will be faster.
Sometimes certain number of threads work best for x-core machine. So try
different thread numbers to understand this.

2. CPU utilisation
   Tool to measure  : top on Linux
You could check if the program is cpu bound by running "top" on linux.

3. I/O bound
    Tool to measure  : iostat on Linux
Sometimes a program is IO bound, due to disk reads etc, you could check this
on linux with iostat command.

4. Overhead due to many function calls:

    Tool to measure  : GNU gprof on Linux , Callgrind
There could be a huge overhead on running if a function call is made multiple
times for a small function. This could be checked using Profiler like GNU
gprof for C. Inline functions that are called many times to avoid the stack
overhead.

5. Recursion:
Recursion can cause a lot of overhead, if the structure of function permits,
then use tail recursion, to avoid the stack overhead.

6. Language Choice:
C is faster when compare to Java because it is low level language. Thus
many network security applications are written in C, where speed matters.
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configuration might work best for it.

8. Contention:
If there are multiple threads, they are synchronised to access common
resources, then there can be contention for the resources, which causes
threads to wait.

9. Buggy Synchronization:
   Tools to detect: Helgrind
If there are deadlocks, the program will stop working or the two threads
involved in deadlock will stop. Helgrind is a brilliant tool that you could use to
detect potential deadlocks, data race conditions, misuse of posix thread API.
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OTHER ANSWERS

Tim Hofstetter, Software Engineer since 1985

Written 100w ago

CPU speed, memory load versus available RAM, available cache size, hard
drive speed (if file-system-intensive), network speed (if network-intensive),
(various) bus speed, code optimization, compiled versus interpreted,
onscreen feeback display versus "running silent", hard drive fragmentation (if
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