1024 Words: I Didn't Say It Was Your Fault, I Said I Was Going to Blame You

[Lori_MacVittie]

#webperf We often lay the blame for application performance woes on the nebulous (and apparently sentient-with-malevolent-tendencies) "network". But the truth is that the causes of application performance woes are more often than not related to the "first*" and "last" mile of connectivity. That's why optimization is as important, often more so, than acceleration. And yes, there is a difference.

* That whole "first mile" thing isn't the network as we generally see it, per se, but the network internal to the server. It's complicated, engineering things. Trust me, there's a bus over which data has to travel that slows things down. Besides, the analogy doesn't work well if there isn't a "first" mile to match the "last" mile so just run with it, okay?

[The_Bhattman]

The blame game, at least for the companies I have been in, are fundamentally about ego and/or laziness which doesn't solve the problem. The approach I like to take is determine where most of the problem exists for the entire year. Ideally the helpdesk system would track the problem and solution as server, application, network, etc. This would provide where the % failures would exist. A company could use that to advance their troubleshooting in areas of where the highest probability of failures would exist.My 2 cents,-=Bhattman=-