Why does my program run way faster when I enable profiling?
<p>I have a program that's running pretty slowly (takes like 20 seconds even on release) so, wanting to fix it, I tried to use Visual Studio's built in profiler. However, when I run the program with profiling enabled, it finishes in less than a second. This makes it very difficult to find a bottleneck. I would post the code but it is long. Are there any obvious or not so obvious reasons why this would be happening?</p>

<p>EDIT:
Ok so I narrowed the problem down to a bunch of free() calls. When I comment them out, the program runs in the same amount of time that it does with profiling enabled. But now I have a memory leak :-/</p>
