(whew … posting from an iphone is no trivial task!)

I’ve always preferred convention and readability over hacks and tricks. For example, back in the day, in order to do a lot of graphics tricks on a 386 required assembly language routines, loop unrolling, etc. Basically, while an elegant algorithm may have existed it was necessary to take lots of little deviations in order to get reasonable performance. The price of course was readability, long term maintenance and not being “clean”.

This is a classic case of that. The site has adhered to convention, a fact I can attest to as MarkMcB has harassed me endlessly when I deviated and forced me to fix it. But what is going on behind the scene that cause some queries to bog down on a computer more than capable of doing the task if queried directly from SQL. I realize Ruby is an interpretted language which always incurs a hit and Rails is Ruby heavy on the backend.

But still, when operating systems and virtual machines and heavy applications all functioned just a few years ago on hardware only a third as powerful, is it too much to ask for a short operation not to bog the system? It is clearly easy to throw money at it as hardware is relatively cheap these days. But is the right answer money, plug-in special code, or optimize what’s there at the expense of convention?