One thing I beat on my development staff about is that computers are fast, stupid fast. As in billions of operations per second fast. With rare exception, if I

One thing I beat on my development staff about is that computers are fast, stupid fast. As in billions of operations per second fast. With rare exception, if I do an operation on something in memory, it shouldn't take any more than 1/2 a second for it to happen. This extends to UI interactions, selecting a few thousand items in a list shouldn't take 4 seconds a disk swap. There are times though, when they have to go back and revisit something where they just "let the computer handle it" and whatever libraries they happened to be using do the work, and go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff to be performant from scratch. When that happens, there usually is some pretty large speedup, on the order of hundreds of percent.