Back in 1974, Donald Knuth said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming”. But optimization without benchmarks can be even worse than that. It’s like following a map without using a compass, and just following your instinct that you’re going in the right direction.

Whether it is during development or at runtime, many tools exist to let you measure the performance of your applications. These measures can then be used to prioritize which parts to optimize first, as well as measure the performances gained (or lost) after a refactoring.