Mainframe Voice

Performance; the blink of an eye…

A few years ago, when budgets were abundant, performance was something people cared about. It was seen as important, something that could help you save money, something that could set you apart from the competition. These days, most people only seem interested in the latest benchmarks of Firefox vs Internet Explorer vs Chrome. Did you know that a Composite Cached Page Load time of IE is 982 ms versus 1047 ms with Firefox? (Browser performance). Please check them out both before you decide to launch your new tablet app that touches multiple point in your IT Infrastructure. These 60 ms may mean the difference between life and death… Or do they??? Did you know that the blink of an eye actually takes 150 ms?.... So, you may ask yourself, WHY BOTHER?!?!

You bother (or should bother) because performance really IS important. Not the type of performance I described above (the type that is NOT noticed by end-users) but the performance that IS noticed. The seconds that pass before things happen on your screen……
Especially in the past years, where access TO the Internet has often increased, the applications that ARE accessed often feel slower. I use the Internet all day, every day. And many websites are more sluggish that they used to be, for a reason. As I said, when we had money, performance was monitored and managed. We knew that sub-optimal performance often led to bad performance which, in turn, often led to really bad performance. We knew it was cheaper to prevent than to cure.

But lately, when we were confronted with reduced budgets and staff reductions, performance management was often classified as “low return, low risk”, so money could be saved easily by reducing the amount of time spend on it. Well, it worked. For a while. But after some time, slowly, performance degrades. It’s an almost universal truth. Reduce TLC (Tender Love and Care), things go bad… And when it goes bad, it often goes really bad, dragging other things with it. Suddenly, applications show bad behavior in the strangest of places.

So the cost of doing nothing (or less) is now becoming visible. And it’s expensive. Curing is expensive, and so are unexpected hardware upgrades or acquisitions. But with less staff we need to automate more, find the right tools (that integrate across platforms) that monitor the end-user experience and offer enough information to pinpoint the source of all misery while at the same time offering drill-down capabilities when needed so we can jump immediately into the tool that we can use to solve the problem. And trust me, the cost of a proper (automated) Cross Platform Application Performance management Solution far outweighs the cost of curing bad applications or losing business because of that.

For an in-depth view on how you can do more and work smarter when it comes to performance management, register here for an interesting talk on x-platform performance management. We will not disappoint you.