Some computer scientist by the name of Donald Knuth once said, Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. Bah! What did he know? Of course we all know what he meant, but when you take his statement at face value, the claim is a bit vague. What exactly is it that is being optimized? Well speed of course! At least that is the optimization that Knuth refers to and it is what developers typically mean when they use the term optimize. But there are many factors in software that can...