[plgs]

Performance always matters. People often tend to shut that argument down quoting "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". My opinion is that this quote was never meant to say "Performance/Optimization as a whole is the root of all evil".

If you don't have to care about it, it's because someone else did it for you. And if everyone cared a little, the web would be better place for the users(40MB for a single website maybe ?). (Not talking about other areas than web development here...)

Just think about it twice before dismissing that argument.

[collyw]

It doesn't always matter if your application only has a handful of users (plenty of internal applications) and defaults works at a reasonable speed. Also there are plenty of scripts that need to be run once and once only to get data from one place to another. Optimizing for performance then is pretty pointless.

[legedemon]

Nope. I happen to be a product manager for one of such internal applications with around 60 users. This can be considered as a handful of users when compared to the internet scale. Getting the product adopted even for such a small group was a big pain. The primary complaint - it is slow! After two rounds of performance optimizations, the adoption velocity for new features has increased 10x.