Ultimately if you over load, you overload. A system has a capacity, and a load. If the load is over the capacity, then not everything is gonna happen. This seem

Ultimately if you over load, you overload. A system has a capacity, and a load. If the load is over the capacity, then not everything is gonna happen. This seems like a pretty basic law of, like, doing stuff. [reads more] Oh, OK that's a lot of words to say "benchmark to find bottlenecks" and "focus on bottlenecks when optimising" but I understand, sometimes it takes a lot of words to get this simple idea across. There's a few times over the years since it was published that this article would have been perfect to send to a special someone who keeps insisting we implement Merkle trees or whatever in order to speed up a product that reads in all its files using while (fscanf(cur_file, "%c", ch)) { // process character here }