"Premature optimisation is the root of many evils", or words to that effect. (I forget who said it, but I think it was someone credible.)
Write your code as clearly and simply as you can, then see if it performs adequately under load. If it does, you're finished. If it doesn't, instrument and test, to find out where the program's spending its time, and work on that. Rinse, (and if necessary, repeat). I think it was back in the early days of Unix development that they discovered simplicity, (plain text files, shell scripts rather than binaries, &c.), used to save development time, performed perfectly adequately in most parts of the system, and simplified maintenance. That's in an OS. Baroque music is gorgeous, baroque code isn't.
