Amen! I optimize incrementally; sometimes when you're writing something you can tell it will be CPU-intensive or I/O intensive. You don't know how much, but y

Amen! I optimize incrementally; sometimes when you're writing something you can tell it will be CPU-intensive or I/O intensive. You don't know how much, but you optimize it enough so that it is at least up to par with the rest of the code. It's definitely no good to leave all performance consideration to the end of the project, anymore than it would be to leave debugging to the end, and for some of the same reasons. If you have an algorithmic problem that kills performance, it might be too late to change the code to fix it. Plus, just as one bug can hide another, many performance problems won't show up if another, slower problem is overshadowing it. You have to keep a basic level of speediness to the code as its under development in order to spot sudden changes in overall performance.