Methods, systems, and media to increase efficiency of tasks by observing
the performance of generally equivalent code paths during execution of
the task are disclosed. Embodiments involve a computer system with
software, or hard-coded logic, that includes reflexive code paths. The
reflexive code paths may be identified by a software or hardware designer
during the design of the computer system. For that particular computer
system, however, one of the code paths may offer better performance
characteristics so a monitor collects performance data during execution
of the reflexive code paths and a code path selector selects the
reflexive code with favorable performance characteristics. One embodiment
improves the performance of memory allocation by selectively implementing
a tunable, linear, memory allocation module in place of a default memory
allocation module.