General strategies for memory/speed problems

Question

I have a c++ code which runs through about 200 ASCII files, does some basic data processing, and outputs a single ASCII file with (basically) all of the data.

The progra

Answer 1

Could you share your program ?

1. One thing to look for is whether you are using data structures that do not scale with increasing number of elements.

e.g. using lists to hold a million elements would be extremely slow to traverse/ search (O(n)) as opposed to say using a binary search tree (nlog(n)) or a hashing (O(1)).

2. You should look at whether you are holding on to the data at the end of each cycle (/burn/run) . Ideally you should release all the resources at the end of each run.

3. Sounds like there may be a handle leak ?