On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Dennis Wicks wrote: > Do you have some real numbers to back up that claim? > > Many people make the mistake of comparing the one-time-cost > of a programmer changing a program to the recurring cost of > hardware upgrades. There may be installation charges and there > will most certainly be an increase in MMC for the foreseeable > future. > > Also, once you have your programmers trained, (they still do > that don't they?) they will not write any "bad" programs from > then on out, but if you just throw hardware at the problem it > is still a problem and will likely increase in severity as the > "bad" programming practices proliferate throughout the system. >
More generally, poor performance can arise because of poor code, but there are other possibilities: Hardware too modest for the job chosen. Insufficient testing. Who here hasn't been caught out developing on the Big Thumper, the deploying a working application to a less well-endowed machine to find further find tuning is needed? Unnecessary bells & whistles. This Pentium II is well able to serve my office: I know because it's more powerful than the machine that does the job. What kills it is the Red Hat's idea I have to have KDE or Gnome on it. Whether throwing more hardware at the problem is a question whose answer is "It depends." In my case, the performance problem can be fixed with (very few) tens of Currency Units. However, if the heavyweight eye-candy were replaced with something more modest, the cost savings would be tens of millions of CUs over a million of these servers. However, on an xBox where RAM is measured in Gigabytes, probably nobody would notice the overheads. -- Cheers John. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb Copyright John Summerfield. Reproduction prohibited.
