[VBprogrammer]

I don't even think that is the problem. In my career I've seen full blown arguments over loops which, as a worst case, could only ever contain a handful of items, or are only executed once per user action. That's not facebook scale or not, it's just worrying about the wrong things.

[thrower123]

Fundamentally, some people are allergic to actually profiling things and collecting data. I don't understand it, but there are lots of people who would rather spend hours talking over things in the theoretical sense, rather than spending a half hour coding it both ways and benchmarking it to get some actual data to make a decision on.

[gpderetta]

On the other hand you can't benchmark every single line of potentially problematic code and even if you could, syntetic tests are not reliable.

If by experience you know that a certain solution can be problematic and there is a different solution which has reasonable implementation costs, you should do what your experience tells you especially if fixing it after the fact would have significantly higher implementation costs.