Is performance important?

Last Update: 26.03.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

I bet your answer will be something like “yes, definitely, or are you crazy?”.

And yep, you are right. At least to a certain degree.

Performance of a website, application, request, whatever, can be important. But it is not always.

But it is not important for this email because when we devs think about performance something else happens.

Often, we devs start to think about performance in a way too early stage of development. Sometimes even before we wrote a single line of code.
Then we start to code and focus too much on the performance part, often leading to shitty design and code. Overly complex, hard to read, hard to understand and what else.
And in the end, either our performance tuning is the culprit of performance issues or it were parts we never anticipated in the first place making any issues.

I’ve seen it countless times and even done that stupid thing myself. Don’t do it before it is actually a problem.

Sure, there are some common exceptions to this. Heavily querying column on an RDMS without setting an index is plain stupid. But beyond that, start with a naive and dumb approach.
Instead of pre-optimization, have a strategy how to handle performance issues. Make a list of all possible candidates for performance issues, brainstorm during the dev phase how you could handle them and then, don’t do anything.

If an issue arises, you can check it against your plan and choose a suitable solution and act.