Power of Small Optimizations

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2024-02-09 19:00:08

Typically, optimizations from higher levels of this hierarchy have more impact on your application than those from lower levels. It does not make a lot of sense to spend time on lower-level optimizations if, on the architecture level, your application is designed in a suboptimal way or the algorithms and data structures choices are wrong.

For lower-level optimizations, sometimes people think that those optimizations always require the usage of some hardcore algorithms or writing code in inline assembly, but a lot of them are fairly simple. In fact, from my practice, clear and simple code is generally fast, and optimizations do not always make code extremely hard to read or think about. It is also great if your application components are well isolated so you can change the internal implementation of some components without affecting other components or the rest of the application.

When I talk about “small” optimizations, they are most likely placed on a lower level of optimizations hierarchy, more often source code level optimizations, and if we measure them in lines of code, they are relatively small. It does not mean that such optimizations are easy because sometimes writing a “right” couple lines of code can be extremely hard and take a lot of time.