First things first—before you start meddling with the code, you should check the Delphi compiler settings for your project. In some situations, they can affect the code speed quite a lot.
To check and possibly change compiler settings, open your project, then select Project | Options from the menu or press Ctrl + Shift + F11. Relevant options can be found in the branch Delphi Compiler | Compiling, as shown in the following screenshot here:
Compiler settings that influence program speed
We will look into the following options:
- Code inlining control
- Optimization
- Record field alignment
- Assertions
- Overflow checking
- Range checking
All of these settings can be enabled/disabled for the complete project and they can also be turned on/off in the code by using compiler directives (comments that start with {$).