Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Updated on December 06, 2023
By Pete Freitag
web

That's a quote from Dare Obasanjo at Microsoft who worked on the MSN Spaces project.

Dare's point is that even the big boys have trouble scaling their applications, MSN Spaces grew much faster than Microsoft had anticipated:

I never expected that we'd grow to be three times as big (as livejournal) and three times as active within a year. We've had our growing pains and it's definitely been surprising at times finding out which parts of the service are getting the most use and thus needed the most optimizations.

He also points out that Google has the same problems, Google Analytics was unusably slow when it first launched and the stats are still at least a day old before you can view them.

Dare wrote this piece in response to 37Signal's recent article: Don't Scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart - also a good read.

So follow best practices, write code that is easy to maintain, don't go out of your way to optimize anything while during development. Once you have actual users you can get a better idea of what areas need optimization, and spend your time on more important things.

I also recently found a post in my archive called Over Tweaking on this subject that is worth checking out.



optimization performance scalibility 37signals tuning

Premature optimization is the root of all evil was first published on December 08, 2005.

If you like reading about optimization, performance, scalibility, 37signals, or tuning then you might also like:

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Comments

This isn't a useful comment, but I just wanted to add a mega-ditto.
by Raymond Camden on 12/08/2005 at 4:03:59 PM UTC
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/donaldknut181625.html
It's actually a Knuth quote.
by Shelby Davis on 12/09/2005 at 2:08:08 PM UTC
Ah, thanks for pointing that out Shelby.
by Pete Freitag on 12/09/2005 at 2:44:45 PM UTC
I thought case sensitivity was the root of all evil!
by Scott Fitchet on 12/09/2005 at 9:34:47 PM UTC
I'm just feeling a bit nit-picky today, but the original quote if from C. A. R. Hoare; Don Knuth just popularized it.
The full quote is: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html#id2878810
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_tuning

Cheers,

Geoff S.
http://geoff-s.net/
by Geoff S. on 04/04/2006 at 7:53:08 AM UTC