Producing the fastest possible executable

Question

I have a very large program which I have been compiling under visual studio (v6 then migrated to 2008). I need the executable to run as fast as possible. The program spends most

Answer 1

Another optimization option to consider is optimizing for size. Sometimes size-optimized code can run faster than speed-optimized code due to better cache locality.

Also, beyond optimization operations, run the code under a profiler and see where the bottlenecks are. Time spent with a good profiler can reap major dividends in performance (especially it if gives feedback on the cache-friendliness of your code).

And ultimately, you'll probably never know what "as fast as possible" is. You'll eventually need to settle for "this is fast enough for our purposes".