What is Software Performance?
March 17, 2007 – 10:00 pmHow do I achieve good performance?
By performance testing, of course! That's the short answer. In reality, what makes a web site perform well is largely good design, followed by good testing. By my estimate, 80% of a site's performance will come from good design and best practices, while 15% will come from performance testing, tuning and optimization, and the last 5% from luck. Of course, depending on your resources (time, people, money) you can decrease the amount of luck involved, but there will always be some non-neglible luck factor, because you can never predict with 100% accuracy exactly how your web site will be used (or abused).
Does this mean as a performance engineer, I only account for 15% of my web site's performance? Not at all. Well, maybe if you your web site's software architects and engineers are perfet and don't make any mistakes. What this means is that, through rigorous and comprehensive performance testing, you can improve your site's performance at a minimum of 15%, and potentially even more if you find significant architectural or design performance bugs. That's the good news. The bad news is that it can be a lot harder to find the performance bugs that make up the 80% of the site's performance, but that's where PerformanceEngineer.com can help.