Abstract: A system and method for dynamic switching between performance schemes is presented. The software program uses an instruction to indicate whether a pacing performance scheme or a flushing performance scheme is to be used. The selection by the software program is stored in a hardware register that the processor uses to determine whether the pacing or flushing performance scheme is used. After setting the performance scheme, subsequent instructions of the software program will be executed using the selected performance scheme. The pacing performance scheme preemptively stalls an instruction that might overload the queue that stores instructions for the Load/Store Unit (LSU). The flushing performance scheme flushes instructions when the LSU storage queue is overloaded and holds the thread that caused the overflow dormant until the queue is no longer full.