images\quantify_sml.gifbottleneck

A phase in a program's execution that significantly slows down the performance of the entire program. Common causes for bottlenecks include:

§          Useless computation, such as sorting a list before knowing whether the user even wants the list displayed

§          Needless recomputation, such as recomputing the same value instead of caching the results the first time

§          Excessive requests for services, such as processing many small operating system requests instead of a few large ones

§          Waiting for services to complete, such as calling waiting and blocking functions, procedures, or methods (for example, SendMessage() or EnterCriticalSection())

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