Application Performance Tuning

There is simply no way around the fact that the performance of any real-time Web application
is critical to the success or failure of the product. Most user communities today
are very unforgiving of applications with substantial page response times. Time is a
valuable commodity in today’s fast-paced Internet world, so performance is an essential
aspect of user acceptance for any software product.
Thus, it is critical that performance
be considered from the beginning of the software development process. Now, there is a
lot of common wisdom on this topic, particularly about the dangers of spending too
much time up front on optimization.As in many things, the best answer is to take things
in moderation and find a middle ground. Performance should be considered first at the
architecture level and then at increasingly lower levels of detail as the iterative software
development process continues. To begin, this chapter looks at the overall software
development process and how performance engineering fits into the picture.