Computers can do so many operations per second, so fast, that sometimes are considered omnipotent. But, sometimes an approach a little too direct or dumb can transform our fastest machine in a cart ...

This is not the discovery of the century, I know, and every good programmer pays attention to the issue, but sometimes I stop to think how is easy to turn a good-performing program in a disaster.

Just yesterday, I had to check about 10,000 files in a directory from a database of about 20,000 records: the iterating solution a-query-by-file it take an hour; by loading the entire table in a hash and then looking information it take few seconds.
So far, not the sense of life, but a thing on which I like to meditate.

In reply to quickness is not so obvious by DanBev

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