I don't remember who said it, but there are the two basic rules of code developement:
  1. Make it run
  2. Make it run fast.
Once you have something that "works", release that to the User and let them work with it for a while. They are the arbiters of whether the solution is 'fast enough'. If they are happy with it, you are done; even if you could coax an extra 20% reduction ibn the run time if you only ....

That said, there are some problems where the scale is such that you can't have too much performance. As an example, think about processing the Apache logs for the likes of Yahoo or Google or Amazon. If they aren't (individually) producing 100's of gigabytes of logs per day, I'd be most highly supprised. Problems on this size *are* worth tweaking every bit of performance -- a 0.001% reduction in the amount of time it takes to process 1000 log messages translates at that scale to over an hour reduction in the process.

--
zf

In reply to Re: Is Performance Overrated? by zombie_fred
in thread Is Performance Overrated? by pileofrogs

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