Improving performance while optimizing your entire Visual Studio program

Question

Our product is a library that we provide as a dll or static library. I noticed that using optimizing the entire program in Visual Studio improves performance by about 30%. This is good, but referring to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2009/02/24/quick-tips-on-using-whole-program-optimization.aspx I see that it is not recommended to use Optimization of the entire program for libraries that are delivered to customers.

The same article mentions productivity improvements of 3-4%. Now that we see the 10x expected increase in productivity, I think we are doing something wrong.

I don’t know how to formulate this, but I will try: Apparently, our code base has a “problem” that WPO can solve very well. Whatever this “problem” (or problems?) Is, it is less important in other software, so WPO has a relatively small impact. Now my question is, what could this problem be? We would like to optimize our code manually, since enabling WPO is not an option.

Answer 1

Perhaps you have several functions, called many times, that cannot be embedded without WPO due to the definition in the source files. You can use the profiler to identify them, then move them to headers and mark them inline .