CIO and Perfcastination

Ask any CIO, how much time they / their team spend on improving the performance of the application deployed. Lowest answer you can get is 25% of their total time.

Ask any CIO, what are the top 5 priority items on his / her list? I be surprised if one of them is not applications performance.

Ask any CIO’s if they have any existing request for hardware upgrade on his / her list to solve performance issues? Answer will be yes.

Over a period of time, based on my experience I have found that most applications are never designed for performance. Development team’s focus is functionality. In quest for packing more functionality they loose sight of performance requirements. Most cases they need to deploy the solution to start the business process. Application deployment happens in most cases without performance testing. Few weeks into the operations, performance issues start showing up. When asked the common answer to these performance issues will be

A. Application is running on low end server
B. Application is sharing the box with other applications
C. Backend database is not capable of handing the load
D. Disk speed is slow
E. Not enough RAM on the server
F. Network link between the application and / or to the internet is slow

In most cases – the panacea prescribed is “Upgrade and your performance issue is solved”

This is nothing but what I called “Perfcastination” by software development team. CIO’s team goes hunting for budget. Most often hardware / application are recently moved into production. Getting budget approved is a nightmare for CIO. Two common questions are

Why did you not right size it just few months back?
Do you guarantee that this upgrade will solve the issue?


Perfcastination is perfect tool used by development team to park the problem. Most often when performance issues happen, it’s either CPU is fully utilized, high disk I/O, longer SQL execution time etc. Easiest thing is to park the problem on the upgrade that gives them couple of weeks to months to get it done. While some smart teams use the time to look at the intrinsic issue and resolve it, however most bank on the upgrade. They truly believe in what they preach!!!

Post upgrade, most often than not, CIO is again back to the desk with performance problems.
I leave you readers to read this and let me know your thoughts.
My next post on the topic shall be - “101 on managing Perfcastination for CIO!”

Asiatic Lion

Sunday - 12th Oct was a day with little activity.
While browsing the net around to see how much information is available about my native place Una - Gujarat. I landed at two good sites giving information about Asiatic Lion and Gir forest.

Gir Forest Guide - http://girforestguide.blogspot.com/

All about Asiatic Lion - http://girasiaticlion.blogspot.com/

I had the opportunity to see Lion's in Gir forest couple of times. Grandeur of 'Vanraj" as called in Gujarati cannot be explained in words here...It can best be seen...

As it stands today there are close to 350+ Asiatic Lions in the world today. If you spend couple of day's in the forest, you are bound to see them multiple times with their prey or at water ponds...