Efficiency Guidelines

This section describes the DataBasic runtime code for features that most often cause performance problems in an application. This information should allow an experienced DataBasic programmer to write more efficient code, and also allow anyone with some DataBasic knowledge to identify the cause of performance problems in existing applications.

The effectiveness of more efficient code depends on how often the code is executed. When addressing performance issues, always concentrate first on the programs within an application that are run the most frequently, and on the code within a program that is executed most often (the 'inner loops'). The debug profiler (PR) feature helps identify program areas that are most often used.

No quantitative measures of the effectiveness of the issues discussed are given because they are dependent on the actual data being processed, the particular model being used, the configuration of the system, and the release of the operating system.

The following aspects of efficiency are covered:

• Internal Storage
• Numeric Operations
• Dynamic Arrays
• File Open and Close
• File Input and Output
• Locking
• PERFORM
• Efficient use of Subroutines
• Miscellaneous
• Using the DataBasic Profiler