Then I found out that I was spending too much time looking up some of the things in the hash maps. So I made sure that the keys for the most frequently accessed object were immutable and shared via a common cache. And then I stored the pre-computed hash code inside the key, because not having to hash the key every time would speed up the searches a lot.
But the C++ code was running too slow, as I'd replaced the old shared pointers there. So I did the same trick in C++ that I done with the shared immutable cached keys with the pre-computed hash codes. Still not fast enough though.
Well, there was this value that I had previously pre-computed and stored, but was now looking up on the fly in a hash map with potentially multiple checks per value. Let's try putting that stored value back and only updating it when it needs to be updated.
Yes, that is fast enough.
*sigh*
