Ron Jacobs has a recent blog entry in which he discusses the trade-offs involved in the design of the ShadowFax reference application and he asks a question -

"What price would you pay (in terms of performance) and what gains would you need to get to consider this trade a fair deal?"

The issue with the question is that you REALLY need more information on the application before you can answer it.  Once you have that information you can:

  • Set performance objectives
  • Do performance modeling
  • Know the cost and validate the performance models
  • Do performance testing
  • ..... and tune the performance as an iterative process until you meet your performance objectives.
 
Does this sound familiar? It should, as it is part of the "Performance and Scalability" guidance that is put out by Ron's team (PAG) :-)
 
The point is that you cannot answer this question in isolation. You need to balance performance, security, architectural flexibility and developer productivity when designing, developing and deploying an application.  And a lot of the information that goes into making a balanced decision is driven from the business/technical requirements of the application..
 
So the answer is indeed “It depends!”