100%, I’ve done tonnes of (backend) performance optimization, profiling, etc. on higher level applications, and the perf bottlenecks have never been any of the things discussed in this article. It’s normally things like:
- Slow DB queries
- Lack of concurrency/parallelism
- Lack of caching/memoization for some expensive thing that could be cached
- Excessive serialization/deserialization (things like ORMs that create massive in memory objects)
- GC tuning/not enough memory
- Programmer doing something dumb, like using an array when they should be using a set (and then doing a huge number of membership checks)
With that being said, I have worked on the odd performance optimization where we had to get quite low level. For example, when working on vehicle routing problems, they’re super computationally heavy, need to be optimized like crazy and the hot spots can indeed involve pretty low level optimizations. But it’s been rare in the work I’ve done.
This article is probably meaningful for people who work on databases, games, OSes, etc., but for most devs/apps these tips will yield zero noticeable performance improvements. Just write code in a way you find clean/maintainable/readable, and when you have perf issues, profile them and ship the appropriate fix.
- Slow DB queries
- Lack of concurrency/parallelism
- Lack of caching/memoization for some expensive thing that could be cached
- Excessive serialization/deserialization (things like ORMs that create massive in memory objects)
- GC tuning/not enough memory
- Programmer doing something dumb, like using an array when they should be using a set (and then doing a huge number of membership checks)
With that being said, I have worked on the odd performance optimization where we had to get quite low level. For example, when working on vehicle routing problems, they’re super computationally heavy, need to be optimized like crazy and the hot spots can indeed involve pretty low level optimizations. But it’s been rare in the work I’ve done.
This article is probably meaningful for people who work on databases, games, OSes, etc., but for most devs/apps these tips will yield zero noticeable performance improvements. Just write code in a way you find clean/maintainable/readable, and when you have perf issues, profile them and ship the appropriate fix.