I guess the ultimate point is to not have to buy more hardware. Caching and Profiling are both ways to push back that "buy another box" date, and the cool thin

I guess the ultimate point is to not have to buy more hardware. Caching and Profiling are both ways to push back that "buy another box" date, and the cool thing is you get to multiply them together. Unfortunately, as others have mentioned here, if you do Caching first, it sometimes makes it harder to do the Profiling bit later on. The reverse is definitely not true, so it makes sense to do it in that order. So yeah, making money is the ultimate goal, as is not letting money go out the door. Apologies if it sounded like I'm in favor of premature optimization. I guess I needed to be more clear with "Step 3: Wait until something presents itself as a bottleneck".