The Pareto Principle (aka the 80-20 Rule, The Principal of Factor Sparsity and The Law of Vital Few) is a generic rule which states that for many
Vilfredo Pareto
events; roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The Pareto Principle can be applied to many real world scenarios ranging across diverse domains and it works just as well for Software Optimization/ Tuning as any other domain.
Introduction
In software optimization terms, the Pareto Principle implies that 80% of optimization resources are used by 20% of the optimization operations. Since the execution time of software programs is often considered as one of the most important benchmarks for tuning and optimization, the Pareto Principle relates to execution time as 80% of the execution time is usually spent executing 20% of the code.
