Theo Schlossnagle, CEO, OmniTI argues in a blog post quoted below that cheap bandwidth, hardware, and programmers are a mixed blessing and by no means are a substitute for good scalable design. Effective management of resources will win the game. Nevertheless it says a lot about the less than mature state of our industry if such a well-recognized expert as Theo Schlossnagle has to argue for a self-evident truth about the need to think about performance of the critical components early on in the development process.
CNNMoney.com:
...There is a famous quote in computer science attributed to our patriarch Donald Knuth of Stanford University:
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
This, however, is a snippet that abuses and misses the larger point from Knuth’s full statement:
There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse … We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.
In other words, 97% of the time, we waste too much time worrying about small efficiencies. But the other 3% of the time, what I argue is the most important 3%, we fail to make small, vital optimizations that prepare for the onslaught of traffic that we’re trying to generate.
The “tech side” of the industry continues to believe that because computers are getting faster and cheaper, it is better to innovate without optimizing because it enables them to get to market faster and optimization was something they could fix if it became a problem.
In my experience auditing and providing guidance on building websites, failure to find and correct that all-important 3% results in rampant inefficiencies: too much equipment provisioned, outrageous bandwidth usage, frequent and prolonged outages, overstaffing, and a loss of agility, resulting in an acute and profound loss of competitive advantage.
With programmers, hardware and software in abundance, it is easy to manage Web projects as if the 3% can be erased with more elbow grease. Such a backwards looking, “I’ll fix it when I need to” approach is a recipe for disaster. [Read more]
posted by: gqjournal
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