Mastering Clojure Macros

Benchmarking Your Code

No discussion about performance would be complete (or to my way of thinking, even worth beginning) without that famous quote from Donald Knuth [Knu74]:

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.”

If we apply our time-limited efforts randomly around the codebase, it may not improve any bottlenecks that exist. My experience tends to align with Knuth’s advice here: it saves us time, and a lot of wasted effort, to first find problem areas in our programs. If our program doesn’t need to be fast, any performance work is unnecessary, or at least, premature. If our web application spends the ...