If you haven't heard of "premature optimization" then you might enjoy reading what Donald Knuth had to say on the matter. Here is a sample of his quotes: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered." — bhspencer 51 secs ago