In my professional life, I'm only afraid of a few things. John's keyboard, which is coated with that fine patina of brown gunk. A call in the middle of the night saying the app server won't start. And the dreaded request: "Russ, see if you can speed this code up." It's usually code I've never seen. It's probably important, otherwise they wouldn't be worried about how it is performing. And speed it up to what? Still, there are some basics you can fall back on when someone asks you to optimize some code. Here goes...