docs/internals/performance.txt

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Notes on performance
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The intent of this file is to record progress in improving performance.

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Just before 3.1.0:
- Julian made LibVEX_Alloc() inlinable.  Saved a couple of percent.
- Julian started building Vex at -O2.  Saved up to 8% or so(?) in some
  cases.

Post 3.1.0:
- Julian made the tree builder linear.  Saved 2--13% on a range of programs.
- Nick improved vg_SP_update_pass() to identify more small constant
  increments/decrements of SP, so the fast cases can be used more often.
  Saved 1--3% on a few programs.
- r5345,r5346,r5352: Julian improved the dispatcher so that x86 and
  AMD64 use jumps instead of call/return for calling translations.
  Also, on x86, amd64, ppc32 and ppc64, --profile-flags style profiling was
  removed from the despatch loop unless --profile-flags is being used.
  Improved Nulgrind performance typically by 10--20%, and Memcheck
  performance typically by 2--20%.
- Julian changed findSb to slowly move superblocks to the front of the list
  as they were accessed.  This sped up perf/heap by 25--50%, and some big
  programs (eg. ktuberling) programs by a couple of percent.
- Nick reduced the iteration count of the loop in swizzle() from 20 to 5,
  which gave almost identical results while saving 2% in perf/tinycc and 10%
  in perf/heap on a 3GHz Prescott P4.
- Nick changed ExeContext gathering to not record/save extra zeroes at the
  end.  Saved 7% on perf/heap with --num-callers=50, and about 1% on
  perf/tinycc.
- Julian vectorised copy_address_range_perms for common cases, which
  gives about 40% speedup on artificial programs which just do
  realloc() and nothing else, and about a 3-4% speedup on starting
  kpresenter-1.5.0 and loading a 16-slide presentation.

COMPVBITS branch:
- Nick converted to compress V bits, initial version saved 0--5% on most
  cases, with a 30% improvement on one case (tsim_arch) which calls
  set_address_range_perms() a lot.
- Nick rewrote set_address_range_perms(), which gained 0--3% typically,
  and 22% on tsim_arch.