The speed benefit I, as the programmer, am getting is already huge. I'll just tell my boss he needs a faster 'puter. He'll probably save money that way anyway.

For the disbelievers, let's do a quick numbers game. The average cost to a company for an hour of a programmer's time (salary, benefits, lights, deskspace, etc) is around $70. For a top developer, that goes up to $100/hr or more. So, for a week's work (40 hours), that costs your company $2800. Now, a quick google found that you can get a dual-core Xeon server in a base configuration for about $3k from Dell. Let's say tricking it out puts that price up to about $7k. That's 100 hours, or 2.5 weeks of work.

In general, the server your app or db is running on is not a tricked-out dual-Xeon. I've seen performance boosts of 4-10x just by moving servers. Can you provide a similar boost from 2.5 weeks of coding, especially with no new bugs and no additional maintenance burden?

Additionally, you can often get a 2-4x boost just by realigning your database. Yeah ... code optimizations are often the last refuge of the incompetent. (Bonus points to whomever can identify the source of that misquote.)

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^3: best way to inline code? (i.e. macro) by dragonchild
in thread best way to inline code? (i.e. macro) by ManFromNeptune

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