[NCLUG] programming question

[Gary Rogers]

Not when you're dealing with systems that are (or percieved to be) mission
critical. Take a hypothetical situation:

You decide to replace your current legacy order fullfilment solution with a
new Web-Based application. You roll it out to your company of 3000 and
everything is fine, order fullfillment is faster, things are going out the
door faster, more efficiently, you don't require as much training of your
warehouse and sales staff, and thus can afford to get 'cheaper' workers.
Now, management decides to web-enanable this system, re-using code that was
designed for the Intranet. Now instead of haveing a peak load of 3000 users
you have a peak load of potentially MILLIONS of users. Granted it will
probably never be that, but then you never really saw a peak of 3000 users
either. True you CAN throw more resources at the problem, but they have just
taken a larger cost than a day or two of programming time. In fact this
situation isn't too far off from e-bay in the early days. Trying to run
in-efficient code at Internet scales can bite you directly in the posterior
(Mine is growing back slowly ;)

Now all that said, in my experience on the Web a good PL/SQL guy is worth
his weight in gold, as that's where I've seen the bottlenecks in the systems
I've administered. Of course milage will vary (on & off?) with systems that
are now geered to massive numbers of concurrent users. Personally I'd say
you're better off documenting than adding functionality, but then that's
another holy war ;)

g:wq

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Clarke" <clarke at clarkecomputer.com>
To: <nclug at nclug.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 9:42 AM
Subject: Re: [NCLUG] programming question


> On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Evelyn Mitchell wrote:
>
> > It's really important to remember that programmer attention is the
> > one thing in short supply anymore. CPU speed, Disk space, network
> > speed.. all have improved so much that optimizing for them is probably
> > a waste of your time. Yes, there are corner cases where an app is
> > just too slow, and needs to be fixed. But in all other cases, you're
> > probably better off adding new functionality than to be optimizing.
>
> And a faster machine/more memory/larger disk probably costs less than a
> day or two of programming time.
>
>
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