[NeutronBoy]

I'm a massive fan of this sort of 'large-scale micro' optimization. There's a big difference between premature optimization, and having heaps of little sticking points in your project.

One of my favorite examples is Ubuntu - they run their 'One Hundred Papercuts' program [1], which is about fixing and optimizing little things that on their own would never get fixed, but together they are more than the sum of their parts in terms of user experience.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts

[barbs]

My favourite recent example was SQLite, where hundreds of micro-optimizations led to version 3.8.7 to be 50% faster than 3.7.17.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/9054...

[panic]

Here's the associated HN discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420274