Do you use Big-O complexity evaluation in the 'real world'?

Question

Recently in an interview I was asked several questions related to the Big-O of various algorithms that came up in the course of the technical questions. I don\'t think I di

Answer 1

Yes, for server-side code, one bottle-neck can mean you can't scale, because you get diminishing returns no matter how much hardware you throw at a problem.

That being said, there are often other reasons for scalability problems, such as blocking on file- and network-access, which are much slower than any internal computation you'll see, which is why profiling is more important than BigO.