Do I always have to think about performance?

Question

I come from a DBA world and performance has always been an obsession. I am turning to development and I always think about performance, constantly, all the time.

Reading

Answer 1

When it does?

No, seriously. There are some applications that will never have enough users to warrant more than the basic indexes and key relationships in the database. They won't require tuning inner loops of the code. Workgroup size applications, for example.

As things scale, so does the demand for optimized paths, both in code, data access and communication. If you are working on limited hardware (embedded systems) you care a lot about performance. But there are many, many applications that will never see enough users to make the systems resources even notice you are there.

In those cases, all that extra work is wasted money and effort. In some cases your specification makes it clear you need that extra effort. In some cases it makes it clear you never will.