* use a pool of MBState structures to speedup monoburg instead of using a mempool. * the decode tables in the burg-generated could use short instead of int (this should save about 1 KB) * track the use of ESP, so that we can avoid the x86_lea in the epilog Other Ideas: * the ORP people avoids optimizations inside catch handlers - just to save memory (for example allocation of strings - instead they allocate strings when the code is executed (like the --shared option)). But there are only a few functions using catch handlers, so I consider this a minor issue. * some performance critical functions should be inlined. These include: - mono_mempool_alloc and mono_mempool_alloc0 - EnterCriticalSection and LeaveCriticalSection - TlsSetValue - mono_metadata_row_col - mono_g_hash_table_lookup - mono_domain_get * load_class_names can be speeded up by caching the per-namespace hash tables in a new hash table indexed by the index of the namespace in the blob heap. * the managed/unmanaged boundary is quite slow: - it calls mono_get_lmf_addr, which calls TlsGetValue, which calls pthread_getspecific (). This means that 3 function calls are needed for each native function call. * mono_find_jit_opcode_emulation is called a lot of times during compilation, and it involves a hash table lookup. * mcs should create AssemblyBuilders with the Save flag instead of RunAndSave, so the runtime could avoid fully constructing the types in the dynamic assembly. * if a function which involves locking is called from another function which acquires the same lock, it might be useful to create a separate _inner version of the function which does not re-acquire the lock. This is a perf win only if the function is called a lot of times, like mono_get_method. * the frame_state_for function in glibc 2.3.2 can't correctly decipher the unwind tables generated by gcc 3.3. It allways tells the runtime that not all callee saved registers are saved, even when the icall is marked with MONO_ARCH_SAVE_REGS. This forces the runtime to generate wrapper functions for all icalls, slowing things down greatly.