Sorry about the somewhat vague title, title word limit won't let me say much else.

So I'm wondering if anyone here knows about how processor consumptive certain functions are compared to each other.

I'm pretty sure simpler calculations such as addition and subtraction take up much less power than say, finding the square root of pi, but to what scale exactly?

Does finding the square root of a value take a computer 10-20 times more processing power to figure out than something like finding the product between two numbers or is the value pretty much a negligible 2-3 times more processor consumptive?

Just kind of wondering since I'm thinking about how much processing power I can save if I were to do something like measure distance using an imperfect square area
As opposed to a perfect spherical distance measuring function

edit: also, do large numbers or numbers with many decimal places take longer to calculate? (e.g 1+1 vs 1.000001 + 1.000001)

As far as I know, the rectangle area checks are faster than circular checks, and simpler numbers (1, 2, 3) are faster to perform calculations on that more complex numbers (100000, 1.0000001).

I think Lua considers all numbers double precision floats (ie. 0.00000000000 ) so there's nothing to be helped there.
Simpler math is always faster, though.

What's far more effective in optimizing the scripts is localizing your frequently used functions, such as those from math lib.



Here's some more stuff about Lua performance, not CC specific but still valid http://trac.caspring.org/wiki/LuaPerformance

Good article.
Don't know quite enough about lua yet to figure out what everything means, but its helped a lot.