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50 points senfiaj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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Grumbledour ◴[] No.45809114[source]
The question is of course always where someone draws the line, and thats part of the problem.

Too many people have the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote internalized to a degree they won't even think about any criticisms or suggestions.

And while they might be right concerning small stuff, this often piles up and in the end, because you choose several times not to optimize, your technology choices and architecture decisions add up to a bloated mess anyway that can't be salvaged.

Like, when you choose a web framework for a desktop app, install size, memory footprint, slower performance etc. might not matter looked at individually, but in the end it all might easily add up and your solution might just suck without much benefit to you. Pragmatism seems to be the hardest to learn for most developers and so many solutions get blown out of proportion instantly.

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1. sgarland ◴[] No.45810859[source]
It is forever baffling to me that so many devs don’t seem to appreciate that small performance issues compound, especially when they’re in a hot path, and have dependent calls.

Databases in particular, since that’s my job. “This query runs in 2 msec, it’s fast enough.” OK, but it gets called 10x per flow because the ORM is absurdly stupid; if you cut it down by 500 microseconds, you’d save 5 msec. Or if you’d make the ORM behave, you could save 18 msec, plus the RTT for each query you neglected to account for.