Jim Plush shares a handy hint he's come upon while working with debug statements in his code - how to speed them up by 85%.

For many of us we have a configuration file for our web applications. In that configuration file there is usually a DEBUG constant that we can turn on to print out helpful debug statements on the screen or to a flat file.

If you do something similar to get data from your applications consider adding a test for the debug value before calling the function directly. If you do you'll get about an 85% speed gain when debug is turned off. Which probably will be 98% of the time your application is running.

He includes sample code to illustrate along with some of the testing parameters that he followed to get at the 85% mark he did.