Sometimes things aren’t worth optimizing. For example, writing an elaborate but fast sorting procedure is pointless if you’re only sorting a dozen items. It’s possible to sort things by adding them to a sorted list box and then reading them back out in order. With large numbers of items this is horribly inefficient, but if there aren’t a lot of items it is just as quick as any other method, and the code is admirably simple (if a bit obscure).There are other cases where optimization is wasted effort. If your application is ultimately bound by the speed of your disk or network, there is little you can do in your code to speed things up. Instead you need to think about ways to make these delays less problematic for your users: progress bars to tell them your code isn’t simply hung, caching data so they see the delays less often, yielding so that they can use other programs while they wait, and so on.