The sentiment you just wrote is one of the chief inspirations for the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project that I'm part of. Today, we routinely see huge a

The sentiment you just wrote is one of the chief inspirations for the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project that I'm part of. Today, we routinely see huge amounts of computational horsepower evaporated in the name of developer efficiency. Yet the modern web development ecosystem is so plentiful and diverse that there are myriad high-productivity platforms and frameworks that exploit computational horsepower rather than squander it. My opinion is that investing the modest effort to select a high-performance platform and framework gives you the freedom to write inefficient application code first and to optimize later. It is the process that allows you to avoid the most expensive kind of premature optimization I've seen by postponing optimization until well after an application's concept has been vetted by its first several thousand users.