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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Premature Weblog Optimization
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Scoble enages in some premature optimization - I followed his suggestion here:
Want to see the difference weblog optimization makes? Open my weblog and then compare the time it takes to open it when compared with Sean and Scott's weblog, which also is done in Radio UserLand. Now, look at their code. First off, they have indents in their code that are done with spaces. Get rid of the indents and you save 5% or more on file sizes. Then, look at all the MS Office stuff.
A 5% size differential just disappears into the haze of lag on the internet. Maybe it makes a difference for the (ever smaller) dialup users - most of whom aren't reading Scoble's blog, I'd guess :) I can't see any page loading difference at all on my end, using comcast cable modem service.
This all points to one of the mistakes that is very, very easy to make in software systems - premature optimization. You should never assume that you know what the problem is; instead, you should actually test it out. Back when I was a consultant, I can't count the number of times I ran into this:
me: So what's the problem?
them: It's the FooBaz module
me: Have you profiled the system to verify that?
them: Puzzled look
Check first, then optimize. Otherwise, you might well optimize the wrong thing.
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