Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Appropriate use

Over the weekend I sent a link to MagLev to the CTO of the Paying Day Job.

His reply was
Remind me to look at this later when we are focused on tuning the system...
to which I replied

Putting performance and scalability off to 'later' is not a good idea. Performance and scalability are by design, not a bolt-on.
Monday this came-up with one of the Architects who brought up the optimization canard.

When building things in the real world various materials have an appropriate use. You can use materials inappropriately, however there is usually a price to pay.

In computing we tend to ignore this for a variety of reasons. Generally I attribute this to the plasticity of the media and the fact that there's not a lot of difference between one tool and another.

However, when you pick the slowest language in the Shootout and then couple it with a single-threaded framework (we're frozen pre 2.2) you know that you're not building a system that can handle 100's of transactions per second.

You can build a F1 car on an F-150 chassis, just don't expect to be competitive.

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