Modern Embedded Computing

Chapter 18

Performance Tuning

Performance tuning is one of the black arts of embedded system development. You will almost certainly spend some portion of your development schedule on optimization and performance activities. Unfortunately, these activities usually seem to occur when the ship date is closing in and everyone is under the most pressure.

However, help is at hand. We have developed a useful toolbox of tricks and techniques for performance tuning, which are summarized in this chapter. These best-known methods are presented in “pattern” form. Most of the techniques described here are generic performance tuning techniques. The optimization and performance tuning patterns have been organized under the following headings:

• General approaches ...