Dwight writes:
> There's 2 things going on here. Tim is talking about "out of the box"
> performance achievable by reasonably knowledgeable individuals. And that's
> an interesting measure in and of itself.
>
> The other is a measure of absolute best performance potential. [...]
>
> Certainly, an average crew and an average driver with average tires could
> get a certain level of performance out of the race car. And that would tell
> us something, but it would be more indicative of the quality of the test
> crew and driver than the performance potential of the race car. If the goal
> is absolute fastest possible lap times you go with the pros.
>
> [...] If you settle for something less than that you're testing
> something other than maximum performance potential.
>
> That's a personal perspective. Not a vendor position.
I've been kind of following the EJB performance debate with a
spectator-sport attitude, but this prompts me to comment.
To extend your metaphor, while it might be technically
interesting to see which engine is truly the fastest when being
coddled by a team of experts, most of the time you don't really care
which car is truly the fastest, you just want to get there. And most
of the time, when you have a lot of people to move, it's cheaper to
just buy or rent more cars and move more of them at once than it is to
pay for a team of experts to babysit the racecar.
Which isn't to say that it's good to have hard and fast numbers
to compare servers, and it's good to know there are really hardcore
servers out there for hardcore situations (like webcasting the
Olympics :-). But for the other 99.999% of the time, I'd like a
server that I can actually make use of. Different solutions for
different situations.
So yes, "out of the box" measurements are useful, in the right
context, as are "perfectly tuned" measurements.
Steven J. Owens
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