[OT] Application speed (was Re: Tomcat performance benchmark)

[Peter Crowther <pe...@melandra.com>]

2009/12/7 André Warnier <aw...@ice-sa.com>

> On the other hand, it would be really interesting to compare the
> performance of a set of webservers 5 years ago, with the current ones, if
> the comparison is in terms of real-world application requests served.
> Granted, servers have become faster, memory and disk have become cheaper,
> bandwidth has increased, code may have been somewhat improved in the
> meantime.  But on the other hand applications have also gotten bloated in
> the meantime, so I am not quite sure that there would be that much
> difference in the end.
>
> I suspect you'd find that the application servers used similar numbers of
instructions on the common code paths, OSs varied a little but hadn't
bloated too much, and the cost/benefit trade-off of application developer
time against hardware cost was the same as ever: once the system is "fast
enough", no more optimisation is done.  If the system becomes "no longer
fast enough", another round of optimisation or hardware acquisition is
performed, depending on the expected costs of the two paths.

If you look at computers and application software as a means to an end,
rather than an end in itself, this is surely the most economically
appropriate way of constructing it?  Even though artisan and craftsman
programmers might like to pretend otherwise.

- Peter