A Performance Standpoint!!

This is my first write up about the impact of working in performance engineering team for quite sometime. I wrote this in Jun 2010. Hope you enjoy reading this.

Ever wondered what it feels to be a performance engineer (PE)? A PE is that person whose job is to incessantly think about speed, optimization, throughput, measurements and memory leaks. With some retrospection, it recently dawned upon me that a PE wears his “performance glasses” even outside of work. Ever wondered what’s the PE’s perspective when he looks at everyday life?

• The coconut plantation looks like a bar graph and thinks that the shorter bar indicates some problem!
• The vehicles on road appear as TCP and UDP packets. He starts to think whether he is on a LAN or WAN and assumes it’s WAN when it rains.
• Wonders why software does not have the auto-tune feature that is so commonly available with the television.
• Thinks of load testing the cell phone with concurrent users and asks his friends to talk along with him in the call!
• Cars and buses look like small size and large size messages and wonders; can the new product build handle a big container truck? A Train?
• Wants to see camels without hump. Humps are not cool. A spike in graph indicates a problem in the application!
• Wonders why people don’t apply lean principles on the road. Constant flow, less queuing, greater throughput!
• Measures the velocity of the lift in terms of FPM (floors per min) and reasons why there is a speed difference when moving up and moving down.
• Watches crash investigation programs on television. It’s all about root cause analysis anyways!
• Applies queuing theory for Bangalore traffic and calculates the average waiting time at traffic signals!
• Looks for a performance fix for his bike because it is not fast enough!
• Associates “memory leak” with “body fat” because they both accumulate over a period of time and can crash the system.
• Boasts to his friends that he reduced the response time of the software application by a second and increased the throughput by 5%, only to get weird, blank looks!
• Looks for stopwatch option in the gadgets that he buys and thinks it’s a great feature!
• Wonders why a single ATM machine cannot support many users concurrently and thinks it’s a vertical scalability problem!
• Does “capacity planning” for water consumption at home and projects it for next 2 years with the consideration of 2% increase in consumption per quarter.
• Measures the PRT (page read-time) while reading the news paper!
• Thinks that a bottleneck is only good for a bottle!
• Wonders why plumbers are paid less to do the same job -- applying patches and avoiding leaks!

If you happen to see any of the above symptoms in you, please do let us know, there are openings in performance team :-)

~Siva