title: What can I do to increase the performance of a Lua program?
body: <p>I asked a question about Lua perfromance, and on of the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124455/how-do-you-pre-size-an-array-in-lua#152894">responses</a> asked:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Have you studied general tips for keeping Lua performance high? i.e. know table creation and rather reuse a table than create a new one, use of 'local print=print' and such to avoid global accesses.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This is a slightly different question from <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/89523/lua-patternstips-and-tricks">Lua Patterns,Tips and Tricks</a> because I'd like answers that specifically impact performance and (if possible) an explanation of why performance is impacted.</p>
  
  <p>One tip per answer would be ideal.</p>