"Premature optimization is a root of all evil." Popularized by Donald Knuth, author of "The Art of Computer Programming." The point is that optimizing when you don't know you have a bottleneck is usually a waste of time.
Just saw this story linked from SlashDot:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/08/dtrace_user_take/>
It's about some wiz-bang performance monitoring utility from Sun, named dtrace, that's apparently really good at finding the hot spots in complex applications. 'Twould be cool to get this for Linux.
