By using gprof, and doing a little careful counting, you can 
often find out where egregious allocations are happening, and
eliminate them.

I can't give you good pointers on this, because, well, it's a bit of
an art, and takes a lot of experience.  But it _is_ doable, and I have
done it to nontrivial programs in Caml, as well as in Java, attaining
speedups of 2x, 3x, without much code-restructuring.

E.g., once, I took a Stream-based parser, and wrote a Stream module
which only supported "char Stream", and only for parsing.

By writing a few auxiliary functions in addition to this, I was able
to reduce the consing associated with stream-based parsing (the
constant creation of "Some _" blocks) significantly, and got a rather
large speedup.

I was able to see that this was important, basically by looking around
in the gprof profile and trying to follow where the allocation were
happening.

--chet--
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