I usually don't think about performance. nostrademons sounds right: "minimize transformations when you productionize." I don't have experience with productioniz

I usually don't think about performance. nostrademons sounds right: "minimize transformations when you productionize." I don't have experience with productionizing. So far when I've found myself scaling one piece of my pipeline up, I do one of two things: 1) I switch key pieces from arc to scheme or C. 2) I add a periodic precompute stage to reduce cache misses. Like pg said somewhere (update: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html, /15 Jan), the goal isn't optimizing but keeping performance mediocre as you scale up. Update: After reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005145 I see 'productionize' isn't a big-bang, stop-the-world step. By the new definition I find I do rewrite things for performance fairly often. The image in my head now: a ball of mud (http://www.laputan.org/mud http://www.laputan.org/mud) with rewrites as layers. Older layers that have proven themselves harden and fossilize as subsequent rewrites focus more on their performance without changing semantics. But even they aren't immune to the occasional tectonic upheaval.