Performance anti patterns

Question

I am currently working for a client who are petrified of changing lousy un-testable and un-maintainable code because of \"performance reasons\". It is clear t

Answer 1

One that I've run into was throwing hardware at seriously broken code, in an attempt to make it fast enough, sort of the converse of Jeff Atwood's article mentioned in Rulas' comment. I'm not talking about the difference between speeding up a sort that uses a basic, correct algorithm by running it on faster hardware vs. using an optimized algorithm. I'm talking about using a not obviously correct home brewed O(n^3) algorithm when a O(n log n) algorithm is in the standard library. There's also things like hand coding routines because the programmer doesn't know what's in the standard library. That one's very frustrating.