Why does my program run way faster when I enable profiling?

Question

I have a program that\'s running pretty slowly (takes like 20 seconds even on release) so, wanting to fix it, I tried to use Visual Studio\'s built in profiler. However, whe

Answer 1

The general way would be divide-and-conquer, i.e. running only parts of the program and see when the problem goes away. But it sounds as if you already did that. AFAIK free usually doesn't take much time, but malloc can take a lot of time if memory is fragmented. If you don't call free(), the heap never gets fragmented in the first place. (intrusive profiling code might prevent memory fragmentation by allocating small data blocks and filling the free gaps - but I admit that's bit of a weak explanation).

Maybe you can add manual time measurement calls before/after the calls to malloc and new and print out the times to verify that? Maybe you can also analyze your memory allocation patterns to find out if you have a heap fragmentation problem (probably by looking at the code and doing some symbolic debugging in your head ;-)