Being lazy sometimes pays off

Interesting post on Gojko.net on how to make web sites go faster.

The crux of the article is summed up in these three points:

• Delegate all long operations to a background process
• Never ever talk to an external system synchronously, no matter how fast it is
• Be lazy – if something does not have to be processed now, leave it for later

The one that resonated with me is the third one. The last search engine I built depended on two external libraries to support very specific foreign languages. One of these libraries took a while to initialize so I would only do it only when I knew it was going to be needed rather than doing the initialization with every new search that came in.