Important reminder

This article is an important reminder that one of the testable requirements for applications must be performance in environment, real or emulated. Just working is not often (most of time) enough. All systems have some problems but performance problems are mainly in design and take much longer and are much more costly to correct than many other, often needing a large part of an application redesigned and a lot of redevelopment. It is not just network performance, it can be inefficient database design, memory and/or cpu usage especially in multi-processor systems or clusters, inefficient protocols, inefficient user interfaces, disruptive backup / restore, and so on.

The sad thing is that performance is often remembered only when it is missing and then too often tried to be fixed by adding hardware which may fix the problem for a while but makes it even worse and more expensive when the problem comes back as it always does. Adding more resources also often makes the system unbalanced moving the performance problems to some other part of the system.

It is amazing how fast these facts are forgotten, performance problems in computer systems are nothing new and not very difficult to avoid if addressed early enough in system design.

Click to read the article this is in response to.