Performance - When do I start worrying?

A common problem of the application designers is to predict when they need to start worrying about the Architectural/System improvements on their application. Do I need to add more resources? If yes, then how long before I am compelled to do so? The question is not only when but also what. Should I plan to implement a true caching layer on top of my application or do I need to shard my database. Do I need to move to a distributed search infrastructure and if yes when ! Essentially we try to find out the functionalities of the application that will become critical over time.