Personally, as covered in a previous thread, I don't believe early optimization is bad in situations where you know you will hit performance issues. For example, I write surface modelling and analysis software, where I regularly deal with tens of millions of entities. Planning for optimal performance at design stage is far superior than late optimization of a weak design.

Another thing to consider is how your application will scale in the future. If you consider that your code will have a long life, optimizing performance at design stage is also a good idea.

In my experience, late optimization provides meagre rewards at a high price. Optimizing at design stage, through algorithm selection and tweaking, is way better. Depending on a profiler to understand how your code works is not a great way of getting high performance code, you should know this beforehand.

Personally, as covered in a previous thread, I don't believe early optimization is bad in situations where you know you will hit performance issues. For example, I write surface modelling and analysis software, where I regularly deal with tens of millions of entities. Planning for optimal performance at design stage is far superior than late optimization of a weak design.

Another thing to consider is how your application will scale in the future. If you consider that your code will have a long life, optimizing performance at design stage is also a good idea.

In my experience, late optimization provides meagre rewards at a high price. Optimizing at design stage, through algorithm selection and tweaking, is way better. Depending on a profiler to understand how your code works is not a great way of getting high performance code, you should know this beforehand.