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

This is a total shot in the dark. You've got:

bool getDirectoryContents(const string dirName, vector *conts) {
    ...
    copy(directory_iterator(p), directory_iterator(), back_inserter(v));

How does the performance change if you instead make that:

bool getDirectoryContents(const string dirName, vector *conts) {
    ...
    // note: preincrementing the iterator
    for (directory_iterator it((p)); it!=directory_iterator(); ++it) {
       v.push_back(*it);
    }

My thought is that std::copy is specified to use postincrement. And boost::filesystem::directory_iterator is an InputIterator: it shouldn't really support postincrement. boost::filesystem::directory_iterator may not be happy being postincremented.