What is the relationship between the performance of a system and its cost of ownership? This isn’t the start of a bad joke, but a question that I have needed to consider in detail recently. The question is more involved than it may seem initially, because of the factors that are implicit in the necessary analysis: Continue reading ‘Performance and cost of ownership’ »
Posts tagged ‘capacity’
It is standard wisdom that if you want a database to perform well then you carefully design a set of indices for the tables. Thus, by careful design of the database tables based on their contents and the common queries you can build a database that performs well. The index structures make such a difference that if they are not used on tables with large numbers of rows the performance is unusable. When this approach works then it works really well. There are problems, however, in environments that can lead to real issues, though I won’t go into detail here. Continue reading ‘Does a large database need an index?’ »
When planning to deliver a system based on commercial software it is common to start by using manufacturer’s data on the capability of the product to do initial sizing. (e.g. This will support 200 parallel connected users per CPU.) This data often comes from benchmarking and is valid as long as the test conditions are realistically comparable to your production environment. Continue reading ‘Benchmarking COTS software’ »
