It’s the oldest joke in the book…
Patient: When I do this it hurts.
Doctor: Well don’t do that.
Sometimes performance work is not about adding hardware or tuning applications, its about doing less and doing it smarter. Send a kilobyte not a megabyte, don’t lock all the records when you don’t need to, etc.
For example, what you put in the files served by your website has a huge impact on performance that no amount of server-side hardware can overcome because you don’t control all the computers/networks between you and the enduser. Many times the only way to fix website response time problems is to send less stuff in a smarter way.
I recently ran across Zoompf.com which has a nice tool to analyze your website and make helpful recommendations to speed it up. They do a good job of explaining why the changes they recommend are important and further provide helpful references to more information about each recommendation.
To avoid mistakes you haven’t made yet, you might also want to read a wonderful little book called High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. It points out a lot of small changes that can make a big difference in website performance.
Mostly companies prefer to throw hardware at performance problems, rather than adjust applications, algorithms, or outputs, because it is seen as the low-risk path. Sometimes that works, but sometimes the right thing to recommend is: “don’t do that.”
After you read Steve’s book, try mine: The Every Computer Performance Book at Amazon, Powell’s Books, and on iTunes.
The Every Computer Performance Blog 