Time (processor cycles) and space (memory) can be traded off against each other. Engineering is about compromise, and this is a fine example. It is not always systematic. In general, however, one can save space by encoding things more tightly, at the expense of more computation time when you have to decode them. You can save time by caching, that is, spending space to store a local copy of something, at the expense of having to maintain the consistency of the cache. You can sometimes save time by maintaining more information in a data structure. This usually cost a small amount of space but may complicate the algorithm.