Hotspots

In this post we'll discuss the detection of hotspots in a program.
A hotspot is a place in the program where it is spending a lot of time. Thus optimising hotspots will have higher yield than optimising other areas of the program.

Profilers can be used to detect hotspots, one such profiler is the AMD CodeAnalyst. It is a free software provided by AMD to test programs for AMD machines. The instructions on how to use it are quite clear, and the download is about 50MB.

I have also heard a lot about Intel's VTune, and its features sound impressive. But I have not tested it because of its high cost. VTune even lets you to go inside a machine instruction and see what is happening there. The maximum resolution of Code Analyst, however is only one machine instruction.