When is optimisation premature?

Question

As Knuth said,

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Answer 1

Unless you find that you need more performance out of your application, due to either a user or business need, there's little reason to worry about optimizing. Even then, don't do anything until you've profiled your code. Then attack the parts which take the most time.