Bob's blog

Speed matters

"Speed seems to solve a lot of problems" Geoff "Deaner" Kabush

There's a famous quote attributed to Gary Fisher (and maybe others) that says "Better, Faster, Cheaper - pick two". You can optimize for some variables but it's difficult to optimize for all within a given set of constraints. That's part of the challenge in today's infrastructure when the application designs can move very quickly. I was talking with a customer last week who told me that he's moved to weekly updates for his applications so that they can keep up with the business needs. Clearly, the waterfall method of application development wouldn't come close to meeting their needs. Speed matters in business and you need to find flexible ways to support that through application development.

They're definitely not alone. The pace of iterative software development and increased demands pushes the systems administrators to get as much performance of the systems as possible. It's not enough to simply look at each server and storage unit but rather, the system as a whole to increase throughput and decrease latency. I met with some customers in our Menlo Park EBC and we started to talk about performance tuning best practices. One of the senior guys had been a Solaris sysadmin back in the days of "Virtual Adrian" or the SE Performance Toolkit. At that time, there were some clear tuning parameters depending on the application - networking parameters for a web server or disk blocks and I/O size for a database. The limitations on then current hardware meant that you were very careful about tuning and configuration.

That's not to say that tuning and configuration are not still important. However, if you're able to define performance parameters in advance then you can make sure that the hardware if capable of supporting that performance. Solaris 10 already has the most common performance parameters set in advance. You will still need to tune the operating system for specialized applications but system parameters now have default settings that minimize the need for that. We had several speakers talk about the performance work today and there is plenty that's being done to optimize applications and platforms. A great example is the work on Web Stack project. I've had customer searching for Solaris versions of common AMP stack applications who were very happy when I pointed them to the Web Stack binaries. And that's all work that is done so that a user's applications just run better which is certainly better than talking to a virtual friend.

Posted at 02:47PM Sep 03, 2008 by bs in General  |