What kinds of factors can affect the performance of a program?

[LIU_Q_]

When I use VTune to analysis which factors affect the performance of a program， I often use synchronization context switches, for example, if the synchronization context switches go up, the elapsed time of the program will go up. My question is that are there other factors similar to synchronization context switches in VTune?

[Bernard]

Context switches can affect program's performance. Bear in mind that your process's threads unless voluntarily yielding execution or setting their execution priority to very high (on Windows) will not be able to affect OS scheduler decision to swap contexts.

You should also pay an attention to Front-End and Back-End stalls.

[Divino_C_ · Accepted solution]

Hello LIU,

what do you mean by *similar*? Are you looking only for software events (i.e. page faults, cpu migrations, etc)?

Overall there are many factors that affect the program performance: programming language, compiler, OS, target architecture, etc.

Read these two texts, they are very comprehensive:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-guide-for-developing-multithreaded-applications

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/how-to-tune-applications-using-a-top-down-characterization-of-microarchitectural-issues

[Bernard]

>>>Overall there are many factors that affect the program performance: programming language, compiler, OS, target architecture, etc.>>>

Of course Divino is right there are many more factors involved in program performance beside those mentioned in my post.