[dboreham]

The Nike doctrine works: just do it. Besides that I recommend always ask yourself the question: we told the computer to do X, and it took too long, so what was it doing for that time? The rough answer can come from surprisingly simple sources such as "top". Fancy, intrusive tools such as traditional profilers are often not the best first place to look for answers. If X is some short one-off thing that makes it hard to see what's happening: make it do 1M of X so bulk data can be observed.