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lucas_maximus,
"It is easier to throw hardware at the problem rather than optimize the software."
My experience in the industry is that many managers just say throw hardware at it. One of my old employers bought software which intercepted web service requests from one proprietary system and proxied them over to another using a different mechanism. It was written as a tomcat application server and that's literally all it did. Our network admin installed it in a VM with a gig or so of ram and it was crashing left and right. I
worked with tech support and they wanted us to install it on dual core with at least 2GB of ram, and sure enough that fixed it. Things like that make me cringe.
Fast hardware can reduce the effects of certain types of inefficiencies, but sometimes it's still there. We can look at inefficiencies in economic terms too, like placing a figure on having millions of users waiting a few extra seconds every day. I'm willing to bet that cost quickly overtakes the cost of developers fixing the inefficiency, but of course companies like MS don't really care about those external costs even when they are responsible for them.
Perhaps if companies were to internalize those costs, then they'd change their tune! (Of course I am biased, I'd like to see more demand for my optimization skills).




Member since:
2009-08-18
It is easier to throw hardware at the problem rather than optimize the software. It is a short term solution for now and works well when during a period of churn (like we do with mobiles) ... from 1995 - 2008 it really mattered if your PC was good enough to run windows ... now even the lowest spec machines can run it fine and tbh most games (I have a 5 year old GPU and can still run most of the newest PC games).
Edited 2012-03-23 19:23 UTC