Benchmarking

It is often said amongst programmers that premature optimization is the root of all evil. People who say this have learned that it is better to have a working system that can be improved than a tight, fast, but incomplete system. It is always a good idea to get functionality done first and look for ways to speed up the system afterwards.

When looking for better performance one should have specific goals in mind. Having a target of 20 requests per second is better than a target of 'it should be faster'. Some simple benchmarking can help pin down specific problems, goals, and progress. Benchmarking is not, of course, necessarily indicative of real-life performance; each tool has a certain method of testing that may or may not be applicable to real usage patterns. However, benchmarking is still useful as a rough approximation.