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I think http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/overhead.html gives a pretty good description of what programming "overhead" is. My question though, is how is the amount of overhead that an operation incurs measured? Is there an objective way of measuring this across all platforms (e.g. timing)? Or are there platform specific metrics that must be applied?

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closed as not a real question by jman, 500 - Internal Server Error, João Angelo, Jacob, Graviton Dec 31 '11 at 6:28


2 Answers 2

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If you are able to turn the overhead feature off (even if this requires commenting out some code) then manual timing might be sufficient.

Running the code through a profiler would tell you what proportion of the runtime is the result of the overhead functionality. This approach prevents you from having to second guess where the performance bottleneck might be (the overhead feature might be insignificant compared to some other processing that's going on).

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Basically you do a veriosn with the 'operation' and without and then benchmark them. For what, depends on waht they are. I suspect you are talking "speed", though responsiveness, disk footprint and memory footprint, and resource allocation (Garbage collection etc), even compiling / interpreting can be equally important.

Remember though, one man's optimisation is another man's, this is a bit big in it?

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