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When I got my first real programming job at a games company in the early 2000s, the Technical Director of the project once gave me some advice: if the number of things you are working with is on the order of 10,000 then don't bother optimizing it. Given the increase in computer power in the last 20 years I believe bumping that to 100,000 is pretty appropriate.

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And yet some of the worst performance issues I've had to deal with were in code typically dealing will merely 100s of items, but using algorithms and slow network-based operations that caused everything to run sluggishly most of the time and not infrequently making the resulting user experience intolerable.

I do agree though that a lot of time is wasted on premature or even completely counterproductive optimisations for situations where the data being processed is too small to cause noticeable slowness in processing.

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