Scaling object with code vs scaling with animation

Hi,

I was wondering what would be better performance wise. I have a plant model that animates hundreds of scales and curves for leaf growth and plant growth. What is the performance difference between animating a object to scale larger vs doing it by scaling the transform? this model has hundreds of scale and rotations on it for the growth.

I'm thinking of doing a combined mesh version and scale just the entire object from small to large over the same animation Length of time as the original model. what are your thoughts?

 

First, if you can simplify object, by merging what you can, keeping desired effect. You want reduce number of objects, where not necessary. Unless you are doing strictly plant simulator

If you resize anything, what is not a texture, pretty much is a transform of the object anyway.
However, I am not sure, what you exactly mean by