Comment by perl4ever

I am inclined to think that 99% of the time people blame a tool for being slow, there are very, very basic issues in how they use it. And often people are just not motivated to solve those issues if they don't like the tool anyway.

I was handed a T-SQL script once, that produced a report on a few thousand items in a document management system. I was asked to use it to get statistics on a few hundred databases with millions of documents each. Which would have taken a few centuries at the speed that it ran. So I looked at it and realized the core was a procedural loop, which ran a separate SQL query for every row of output. Once the procedural part was replaced with one SQL query, it ran thousands of times faster and then all that remained was to replicate it to a bunch of databases and build the report in parts.

My rule of thumb is that if anything is too slow these days, it's because something is terribly misconfigured or something is severely wrong with the algorithm.