On the contrary. It's immensely practical. You're assuming your time is worth less than an extra GB of RAM. Assuming that ignoring all the optimisations saves you 4 hours of time in development, and about 50% (another 2 hours) in debugging, and 1GB of RAM is worth $120, you need to be paid $20/hour or less in order to justify wasting time on such an optimisation.

In actuality, most programs will take much longer than that to write optimised - even from the ground up - especially in areas where you're unsure of the optimisation required. And RAM, CPU speed, and disk speed are all getting cheaper, not more expensive.

As I've said before, it's not performance that matters, but responsiveness. If you get it responsive without wasting time on unneeded optimisations, why spend time/money on it to get it "faster"? You're right that time is money - you gotta take into account the programmer's time/money, too. I don't know about you, but I haven't made under $20/hour since I left university. It's cheaper to buy the stick of RAM and move on to the next business problem to be solved.

In reply to Re^3: creating large xml files by Tanktalus
in thread creating large xml files by ftumsh

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.