A high-level synthesis compiler translates a source program written in a high level programming language such as C or SystemC into an equivalent circuit. The performance of the generated circuit in terms of metrics such as area, frequency and clock cycles depends on the compiler optimizations enabled and their order of application. Finding an optimal sequence for a given program is a hard combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a practical and search time efficient technique for finding a near-optimal sequence for a given program. The main idea is to strike a balance between the search for a universally good sequence (like that of O3) which works for all programs vis-a-vis finding a good sequence on a per-program basis. Towards that, we construct a rich downsampled sequence set, which caters to different program classes, from the unbounded optimization sequence space by applying heuristic search algorithms on a set of Microkernel benchmark programs. The optimization metric that we use while constructing the downsampled sequence set is the execution time on a scalar processor. Given a new program, we try all the sequences from the downsampled sequence setand pick the best. Applying this technique in the LegUp high-level synthesis compiler, we are able to obtain 23% and 40% improvement on CHStone and Machsuite benchmark programs respectively. We also propose techniques to further reduce the size of the downsampled sequence set to improve the sequence search time.