Jon Bentley has a chapter on this topic in the performance section of Programming Pearls. This is a very useful skill for reasoning about problem boundaries. Al

Jon Bentley has a chapter on this topic in the performance section of Programming Pearls. This is a very useful skill for reasoning about problem boundaries. All too often, our performance estimates are on the order of "fast" and "crazy fast". Worse yet, we build systems without understanding how they will scale under load.