1.4 Concluding Thoughts


Approaching any complex task usually requires some measure of grounding in fundamentals, and a basic understanding of the underlying principles. We've touched upon what performance tuning is, the basic ideas behind computer architecture, the big questions surrounding 64-bit environments, static performance tuning techniques, and some fundamental principles of performance. While it's very difficult to approach the effectiveness of, say, ground school in pilot training, in an introductory chapter, I hope this chapter has given you some sense of the currency in which the rest of this book trades.

I have a suggestion for an exercise, which I think is particularly applicable if you are intent on reading this book cover-to-cover. Go back and reread the five principles of performance tuning (see Section 1.2 earlier in this chapter), put this book down for an hour , and think about what those principles mean and what their implications are. They are very broad, general concepts that are relevant far beyond the context in which they've been presented. Their application is left entirely to you -- in some sense the most difficult part -- although I hope you will find the rest of this book to be an effective guide. When you sit down to analyze a problem, ask yourself a few questions: do I understand what is going on? If not, how can I design meaningful tests to validate my theories ? Am I, or my customers, searching for a "free lunch "? What tradeoffs am I making to get the performance I want? Am I overconsuming a resource? Are the metrics I am using to measure performance ones I have developed? Are these metrics measuring what I think they are?

These are all difficult questions, no matter how simple they may appear: they are innocent-looking trapdoors that lead into dark, confusing dungeons. It's not unusual to find eight or ten performance experts in a meeting discussing what exactly is going on in a system, formulating theories, and designing experiments to test those theories. If there is anything you take from this book, I earnestly hope it is those five principles. It's hard to go too far wrong if you use them as your guiding light.



System Performance Tuning2002
System Performance Tuning2002
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 97

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net