Ask HN: When do you start thinking about performance in new projects? - JCDenton2052
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cocktailpeanuts
I can assure you: If you're asking this question, you are far from that point.

Nowadays you can host projects on services like aws, heroku, etc. and they
have pretty good performance right out of the box. You will rarely reach a
point where performance is a huge issue.

This may happen if you hit the HN front page, get covered by the NYTimes, etc.
but even then, you could just spin up some dynos to handle it temporarily and
think about if this is just a spike or an actual growth. In 99% of the cases
it's just a spike and you'll be back to normal the next day.

If you DO reach the point where performance becomes important, that probably
means you have enough users. And in the worst case you could even ask your
users for help. But if you're doing this well, you can really just tweet for
help and many people will try to help you.

TLDR: Don't optimize until you get to a point where it becomes painfully
obvious that you MUST optimize.

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flukus
For my own projects: Straight away to an extent. I take pride in making things
work fast, within reason.

For work: I just try to avoid making things slow out of stupidity by avoiding
things likes n+1 queries. On modern hardware this get's you to the "good
enough" point. In enterprise software no one paying me has every cared about
performance, they don't have a problem if it takes 15 seconds to load a page
showing 10 items for instance, they certainly won't pay me to get that 500ms
request down to 30ms.

And that's why commercial software is so slow and bloated, no one will pay a
cent to make it otherwise.

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slackingoff2017
If it's a concern just use a language that's within an order of magnitude of C
and don't write anything exceedingly stupid.

Java, C#, Golang, and Node are all fast enough that you could run 99.9% of the
sites on the internet with a single machine.

