Perf improvements from optimization

Working on performance improvements and profiling for my part-of-speech tagger, I decided to switch from Debug mode to Release mode and see what my perf gain is like with Whole Program Optimization turned on. The difference was amazing. What used to take ~140 seconds to train the corpus, now only takes ~12 seconds. Some of the improvements made include removing variables and functions that are never used, not passing the “this” pointer implicitly if “this” is never referenced, and more.

Continue reading to see how you turn it on:

Select properties from the context menu of the project in Solution Explorer. Then choose Optimization from within the C/C++ submenu:

Start using it and let me know what perf improvements you see.