Welcome Back!

I was discussing with a friend about how to approach some performance issues in the application he works on (for a quite large company you have probably heard of).

As is typical in any contact with performance issues, the problem isn’t particularly with the code (as in, it can probably be fixed), but with the ongoing discussions with the team.

So much of performance is really voodoo and superstition, and everyone has their own beliefs. Some are valid, of course, but in my experience there is always someone going on about using single (‘) instead of double (“) quotes or something similar.*

This leads me to the only rule you really need in these situations:

When discussing performance no opinion should be accepted without a metric

If you don’t have any metrics you both don’t know what your performance issue actually is, and without knowing what your problem is you can’t possibly have a solution.

* In PHP, a string defined ’string’ is faster than “string” because the latter will interpolate and render variables. However, this level of “faster” (or ‘faster’) is so small as to be irrelevant and any discussion is a distraction.