The impact of memory and processor in determining the performance of programs

Performance analysis of a program means executing a program on computers with different hardware resources and optimization of their running time. It is very useful because it provides information of how to distribute efforts and resources in order to ensure greater efficiency and to keep developers focused on the essential goals of the program. In this paper, the main attention on determining the performance of a program is focused in finding the impact of memory size and the speed of processor. To that end, as an example for analysing the performance of a program and for seeing the dependance of the execution time of a program we will study some examples of programs for sorting. Sorting programs are chosen to analyse because many scientist consider sorting as one of the most crucial problems in the study of algorithms and programs. The sorting algorithm are implemented in C++ and tested in 3 machines with different configurations and with different input values, to see the changes of running time depending on many circumstances. The results are presented in tabular and graphical format. Also they are analysed if the crucial factor for an algorithm to run faster or slower is the amount of CPU used or is the amount of RAM memory used.