Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. You may obtain a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor Boston, MA 02110-1335, USA.

Many of the names used by companies to distinguish their products and services are claimed as trademarks. Where those names appear in any GNOME documentation, and those trademarks are made aware to the members of the GNOME Documentation Project, the names have been printed in caps or initial caps.

 2004-2005 Callum McKenzie 2004-2005 Robert Love Software can be optimized in many ways: for speed, program size, or memory use. This section contains guides and tutorials for optimizing your software. Optimization Guide
Introduction

This is a brief introduction to optimization, both the hows and the whys. Details of individual tools and techniques are left for later articles, but a collection of hints and tricks is provided.

Massif

This article describes how to use the Massif heap profiler with GNOME applications. We describe how to invoke, interpret, and act on the output of Massif. The Swell Foop game is used as an example.

Harmfulness

Disk seeks are one of the most expensive operations you can possibly perform. You might not know this from looking at how many of them we perform, but trust me, they are. Consequently, please refrain from the following suboptimal behavior: